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• Dr Annabelle Lukin

Formal name: Annabelle Lukin Position: Macquarie University Research Fellow, Centre for Language and Social Life, and or Lecturer in Linguistics. Personal Title: Dr Qualifications: BA (History and Sociology), University of Queensland MA (Spanish and Latin American Studies) University of New South Wales Dip Ed (History and TESOL) University of Sydney Grad Cert (TESOL) University of Technology, Sydney Grad Dip (Education Studies) (With Merit) University of Sydney PhD (Linguistics) Macquarie University Telephone: +61 2 9850 8607 Fax: +61 2 9850 9352 Email: annabelle.lukin@mq.edu.au Location: C5A 423 Web Pages: Selected Publications

Profile

Annabelle is lecturer and Macquarie University Postdoctoral Fellow in the Centre for Language in Social Life (CLSL) in the Department of Linguistics. The CLSL specializes in the study of language in its social context, drawing on a range of sociolinguistic theories but with a particular basis in systemic functional linguistics. 

Annabelle is currently working on a project investigating the reporting of war, using SFL and  a corpus of Australian and international news reports. Text forms under investigation include news reports, political speeches and press briefings. From a theoretical perspective, the central notion is Halliday’s concept of register. The project will contribute to an understanding of the theory and method of register analysis. She is currently writing a book on the ABC’s reporting of the invasion of Iraq.

Annabelle’s PhD research was in educational linguistics. She investigated the study of literature in high school, and the processes by which theoretical knowledge is recontextualised in syllabus documents and enacted in educational practices. She demonstrated the disjunction between taking a theoretical position on how literary texts ought to be studied, and how such theory can be seen, or not, in actual textual practices: in other words, what does it mean in practice to be, for instance, a structuralist, post-structuralist, feminist, or Leavisite critic? She considered this question with respect to the teaching and assessment of the study of poetry in the senior high school in NSW, and in the context of the recent shift to a much more explicitly theoretical English syllabus. She was awarded the Vice-Chancellor’s commendation for a thesis of ‘exceptional merit’.

Annabelle researches and supervises in discourse analysis of Spanish, including media and literary texts. More recently she has begun to work on bringing stylistics and translation theories together.

With colleagues at UTS, she was part of a research team investigating the interaction of intonation with other levels of the language system, grammar and semantics. She has contributed expertise in theories and analysis of semantics, in particular with the analysis of ‘speech function’ and ‘semantic networks’, as developed by Emeritus Professors M.A.K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan. The project was the first to investigate a social context with attention to all levels of form and meaning in discourse. This project is part of an umbrella project, called AusTalk, which is developing a corpus of spoken Australian English. She has been part of the AusTalk project team since 2001, and has collected and contributed new data to the corpus. The corpus is approaching 1 million words, and includes registers as varied as dinner party conversation, service encounters, workplace meetings, and university lectures.

She has also been interested in child language development and language evolution, and in 2004 co-edited a volume of papers with Geoff Williams called Language Development: functional perspectives on species and individuals (Continuum: London).

Annabelle is actively committed to bringing linguistics to the general public, and has produced pieces for media as diverse as ABC Radio National (Ockham’s Razor and Perspective), D!ssent magazine, Education Links, Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian  and Macquarie News, and been interviewed on Melbourne’s 3AK, Triple J and Radio National’s Life Matters programme.

Previously, Annabelle has worked in language and literacy education, as a teacher, materials writer and curriculum developer, with ESL and Aboriginal tertiary preparation students.