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Department of Linguistics

Staff Research Interests

Research Supervision Preferences of Academic Staff

The following listing shows the areas of particular interest and research specialisations of staff members in the Macquarie University Department of Linguistics, for purposes of M.A.(Hons.)/Ph.D research supervision. Persons wishing to apply for admission to research candidature in this Department may wish to direct their initial enquiry to a specific staff member about the possibility of supervision.

Prof. Anne Burns

  • Language teacher beliefs and cognition
  • Literacy/reading/writing research in educational settings
  • ESP and EAP theory and practice
  • Adult immigrant and ESOL policy, theory and practice
  • Analysis of spoken discourse in educational and professional settings
  • Second language teacher education
  • Qualitative and action research based in language classrooms
  • Theory and practice of TESOL curriculum development

Dr Caroline Henderson-Brooks

  • The linguistic representation of self
  • Application of Systemic Functional Linguistics to spoken discourse
  • Application of Systemic Functional Linguistics FL to health discourse, in particular psychotherapeutic discourse
  • Interactions between appraisal theory and grammatical analysis

Assoc. Prof. David Butt

  • Text linguistics: as a source of evidence in all forms of social research
  • Grammar, semantics, context: links between descriptions, and forms of representation (especially networks)
  • Stylistics and variation: theory and description, from genre/register to literary styles
  • Language and complex systems: modelling behaviour as networks of 'choice'; intelligent systems
  • History of Linguistics: e.g. from Saussure to Prague School; Rhetorical traditions

Prof. Christopher N Candlin

  • Integrating discourse analysis, pragmatics, interactional sociolinguistics and text analysis in the study of communication in healthcare, law, social services, management and organizations, involving a range of research methodologies
  • Research-based and theorized studies in Applied Linguistics (in fields other than language education, for example in translation and community interpreting)
  • Relationships between discursive competence and professional expertise
  • Critical discourse analysis: its intellectual bases and applications in social life
  • Disciplinary discourses in the academy and the professions
  • Site-specific language policy, especially in multilingual and multi-cultural contexts
  • Language learning and teaching processes in technology-mediated environments

Dr Felicity Cox

  • Phonetics
  • Acoustic analysis
  • Accent variation and change
  • Australian English
  • Sociophonetics
  • Phonetic transcription

Assoc. Prof. Linda Cupples

  • Psycholinguistics
  • Sentence comprehension
  • Sentence production
  • Reading development and instruction
  • Reading disorder
  • Reading in people with intellectual disability

Assoc. Prof. David Hall

  • ESP/EAP/LSP
  • Management in language teaching operations
  • Learner autonomy
  • Curriculum development
  • Distance learning
  • Written language in the medical field
  • Chanson française

Dr Maria Herke

  • Text analysis (spoken and written) for social research and community benefit
  • Mapping textual, logical, experiential and interpersonal translation shifts
  • Text analysis for professional communication, particularly in healthcare contexts
  • Stylistics
  • Corpus analysis
  • Forensic linguistics
  • Text analysis integrating lexico-grammatical, semantic and contextual  analyses

Dr. Alan Jones

  • Discourses of Professions and Organisations
  • Business Discourse
  • Communicative Expertise
  • Academic Literacies - English for Academic Purposes
  • English for Science and Technology

Assoc. Prof. Trevor Johnston

  • Signed language lexicography and lexicology
  • Digital language documentation and signed language corpus linguistics
  • Signed languages and linguistic typology
  • Gesture and language (signed and spoken)
  • Functional-cognitive linguistics, construction grammar and signed languages
  • Language change and grammaticalisation in signed languages
  • Sociolinguistic variation in signed languages
  • Signed language acquisition and assessment
  • Sign bilingual education for deaf children

Dr. Sun Hee Ok Kim

  • Sociolinguistics with particular interests in language attrition, maintenance, and shift
  • Bilingualism in immigrant contexts
  • Teacher discourse
  • Code-switching
  • Adult second language learning

Dr Mira Kim

  • Translator and interpreter education
  • Translation quality assessment
  • Text analysis for translation and interpreting
  • T&I curriculum development
  • Language teaching for advanced learners
  • Sustainability for education
  • Korean language typology

Mr John Knox

  • Language in education
  • Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) (especially as an analytical tool)
  • Multimodality
  • Media discourse
  • Curriculum development and implementation
  • Pedagogic discourse in face-to-face and online contexts

Dr Caroline Law

  • Psycholinguistics
  • Communication disorders (developmental and acquired language disorders)
  • Reading development
  • Reading disorders

Dr Annabelle Lukin

  • The context to text relationship, particularly as described in Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics
  • Text linguistics: as a source of evidence in all forms of social research
  • Stylistics and variation: theory and description, from genre/register to literary styles
  • Stylistics and translation
  • The study of media and political discourse
  • Educational discourse

Dr. Robert Mannell

  • Acoustic Phonetics (First and Second Language)
  • Speech perception
  • Auditory Processing of speech
  • Speech Synthesis and Text-to-speech
  • Evaluation of speech technology

Dr Catherine McMahon

  • Diagnostic audiology
  • Electrophysiology
  • Auditory Neuropathy
  • Tinnitus
  • Meniere's Syndrome
  • Auditory Processing

Dr Stephen Moore

  • Discourse Analysis (Pragmatics; CA; CDA; SFL)
  • TESOL/Applied Linguistics teacher education
  • Language learning in Asian contexts
  • Academic and professional English
  • Language assessment

Dr Jill Murray

  • Pragmatics
  • Second Language Acquisition
  • TESOL methodology and curriculum
  • TESOL and LOTE teacher development

Dr Jemina Napier

  • Signed language interpreting
  • Application of translation and interpreting theory to practice
  • Translation and interpreting pedagogy
  • Community interpreting
  • Conference interpreting
  • Signed versus spoken language discourse
  • Sign/spoken language bilingualism
  • Discourse based research on sign language/ interpreting or education

Prof. Philip Newall

  • Amplification for the hearing-impaired
  • Assessment of hearing handicap
  • Tinnitus
  • Auditory processing disorders
  • Aural rehabilitation
  • Epidemiology of hearing loss
  • Audiology in developing countries
  • Hearing loss in older persons

Dr Jennifer Peck

  • Gender and language
  • Language and power
  • Cross-cultural communication
  • Discourse analysis
  • Workplace communication

Prof. Pam Peters

  • Australian English usage
  • World Englishes
  • Computerised databases of English texts
  • Orthography and Morphology
  • Linguistics as applied to writing
  • Editing and Publishing

Assoc. Prof. Mehdi Riazi

  • Academic Writing
  • Disciplinary Literacy
  • Language Testing and Assessment
  • Research Methods
  • Language Teaching Methodology
  • Materials Development and Evaluation
  • Language Learning Strategies
  • Program Evaluation
  • Text Analysis
  • Teacher Education

Dr. Verna Rieschild

  • Arabic sociolinguistics/semantics
  • Linguistic virtuosity
  • Anthropological linguistics
  • Conversational Analysis
  • Topics in languages and cultures other than English; particularly Afro-Asiatic

Dr. Peter Roger

  • Communication disorders: bilingual aphasia (sociocultural factors; approaches to assessment and rehabilitation)
  • Second language acquisition: English for Academic Purposes (individual learner differences; syllabus and materials design)
  • Second language acquisition: English for Specific Purposes (English for medical/allied health professions or for biological/biomedical sciences)

Assoc. Prof. Eddie Ronowicz

  • Cognitive processes in translation and interpreting
  • Translation strategies
  • Translation pedagogy
  • First language attrition

Dr Mridula Sharma

  • Diagnostic audiology
  • Electrophysiology
  • Cortical Auditory Evoked Potentials
  • Discriminative Auditory Evoked Potentials 
  • Auditory Processing Disorders
  • Hearing Disorders and amplification solutions
  • Cochlear Implantation

Ms Helen Slatyer

  • Community interpreting
  • Curriculum design and evaluation
  • Translation studies (French<>Eng translation in particular)
  • Language testing and assessment
  • Translator and interpreter testing

Dr Stanley Zhongwei Song

  • Translation & ideology
  • Interpreting skills & analysis

Dr. Jan Tent

  • General/descriptive linguistics
  • Language variation and change
  • Sociolinguistics
  • Language use
  • Language attitudes
  • World Englishes; Pacific Englishes
  • Toponymy
  • Lexicography

Dr. Rosalind Thornton

  • Child language acquisition of morphology, syntax and semantics
  • Syntax
  • Bilingual children's acquisition of grammar
  • Universal Grammar
  • Second language acquisition from the perspective of generative linguistics

Dr Canzhong Wu

  • Systemic functional theory and its application in discourse  analysis and interpretation
  • Translation theory and practice
  • Corpus development and management — design of XML tagging systems, computational tools for corpus analysis
  • Development of computational tools for multilingual grammatical  reference resources
  • Machine translation and computer-assisted learning and teaching
  • Development of theoretical and computational models of language as a complex, multidimensional system

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