Department of Linguistics
Dr Alan Jones
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Formal name: Alan Jones Position: Senior Research Fellow Personal Title: Dr Qualifications: BA (Hons), University of Sydney; RSA Cert TEFLA Australian College of English, PhD ANU (Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies) Telephone: +61 2 6156 0348 Email: Alan.Jones@mq.edu.au Research Supervision: Students/Topics
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Academic profile
Dr Alan Jones joined Macquarie University in 1998. From 2001 he was responsible for the EAP Section within the Department of Linguistics (EAP = English for Academic Purposes). Alan later designed, convened and taught the unit LING969 'Teaching English for Academic Purposes' for a number of years – this a unit of study was designed to provide a qualification for practicing EAP teachers. From 2003 on he became involved in developing Macquarie’s innovative Master’s in Communication in Professions and Organisations, a project led by Professor Chris Candlin. In particular, Alan wrote a core unit called 'Acquiring Professional Communicative Expertise' (LING956) which he convened and taught till 2009. From 2008 to 2009, he convened and taught LING895 'Writing in Professions and Organisations'.
From 2007 to 2010 Alan convened a Doctorate in Professional Communication as well as the Master’s program in Communication in Professions and Organisations. Along with Professor Candlin he still supervises a number of PhD students taking a discourse-oriented approach to professional communication, including management communication. This approach can also be described as interdisciplinary, multi-perspective, multi-dimensional, and evidence based. Alan’s thinking has been influenced by the social theories of Jürgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault as well as by Fairclough’s approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (“text-oriented discourse analysis”). The work of Professor Michael Halliday, under whom Alan took his first degree in 1978, has been a constant source of linguistic insights. Other important influences have been the work, over many years, of Professor Vijay Bhatia and Professor Srikant Sarangi.
Research interests
One of Alan’s key interests is professional expertise and its relation to communicative expertise. This has translated into an interest in how language and communications skills can be embedded in tertiary levels curriculum. Implicit in these problems is the more theoretical problem of the syntax-semantic interface, i.e. the interdependence of language and thought.
Alan has a longstanding interest in descriptive and theoretical linguistics and in language typology. His doctorate consisted of a comprehensive description of the phonology and grammar of the four dialects of Mekeo, an Austronesian language of Central Province, Papua New Guinea. Later, at the University of Sydney he did extensive comparative work on intransitivity in a range of Asian languages (Mandarin, Indonesian, and Japanese). Pidgin and creole languages (and languages in contact) are an ongoing research interest; in the 1980s Alan recorded two previously unknown trade pidgins based on Mekeo.
Research record
In the past Alan has collaborated and co-published with specialists in physics, accounting, finance and law, investigating subject-specific discourses and developing innovative curricula using a model that can be described as linguistically scaffolded curriculum. In 2004, Alan brought a large-scale teaching development project (funded by two competitive Flagship Grants) to a successful conclusion. That project was entitled ‘The Integration of Generic Skills with Core Curriculum in Economic and Financial Studies’ and ran from 2001 to 2004. While focusing initially on curriculum development and the professional development of academic staff, the grant generated a considerable number of research publications. The team carried out research into generic skills and the integration of language and content as well as into student perceptions, priorities, goals and motivations of generic skills. The project resulted in a book that is now widely used in first year accounting courses, at Macquarie and in elsewhere: Alan Jones and Samantha Sin (2003) Generic Skills in Accounting (Prentice Hall/Pearson).
Current research
Alan is currently carrying out research into the nature of communicative expertise in professions and organizations, with a special interest in the way communicative skills contribute to professional expertise in the field of professional accounting. He is collaborating with Dr Samantha Sin, an accounting academic, on a research and curriculum development project for a book aimed at developing communicative aspects of professional expertise in accountancy and related fields.
Meanwhile Alan currently holds a position as Visiting Fellow in the Department of Anthropology in the School of Culture, History & Language, College of Asia & the Pacific, the Australian National University. There he is translating the texts of folktales and myths collected during his fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, and is exploring aspects of Mekeo society and culture, such as sorcery, emotion, and conceptions of the self that have important linguistic realisations.
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