Cardiff School of English Communication and Philosophy

My recent research investigated language in legal settings. With a particular focus on the police I have examined texts, processes and practices which mediate information between legal specialists and lay people, in both directions. This research contributed to the development of a new written text to explain rights to people in police custody and new procedures to accompany that text. This text and accompanying procedures are now in use in police stations throughout England and Wales. This research project has led me to address a wider range of research questions using predominantly sociolinguistic and discursive techniques. These research questions cluster around themes of ‘difficult’ language, lay-specialist communication, workplace language and the communication of socially important information. I am currently examining ways in which lay people obtain information about the law other than through contact with legal personnel, analysing witness statement-taking, investigating the communication of warnings and developing a project on language in workplaces. I am also preparing books on language in legal settings and in police work.

My work uses a range of techniques, theoretical frameworks and concepts drawn from discourse analysis, new literacy studies, sociolinguistics, ethnography and interactional sociolinguistics.

I am well-positioned to supervise PhD research in any of the topics, and using any of the methods or theoretical orientations, mentioned above. I am also interested in supervising work with an applied focus which aims to address ‘real-world’, language- or communication-related problems and concerns. I have previously supervised work in areas as diverse as attitudes to accents and dialects, comprehension and comprehensibility of immigration documents, suicide negotiations, expectations of rights information. Please contact me if you would like to informally discuss undertaking PhD work with me.

Links

• My most recent book is Communicating Rights: The language of arrest and detention. The book explores ways in which rights are communicated in police custody. You can buy a copy for less from Amazon.
• The Notice of Rights and Entitlements (available in multiple languages). This text was devised by Sergeant John Price. I got involved in examining the text, before it was introduced, by interviewing people who had received a copy while they were in police custody. This led to some revisions to the text and to procedures in detention.
• Beyond Communities of Practice. Information on a recent publication edited by David Barton and Karin Tusting which includes a chapter which I have written.
• The anonymisation of linguistic data. This link provides the abstract for a paper I wrote on anonymisation. The article asks what details of informants' identities should be concealed by those who work with linguistic data. The article would be useful to those who build large corpora and to those who conduct micro-analyses of spoken or written texts.
• The Website for the International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law. This site provides information on the journal and features links to abstracts of articles from the journal.
• The forensic linguistics email list. This email list explores issues related to language and the law. You can search the list archives from this page and join the list here too.
• Homepage of the International Association of Forensic Linguists. Information about IAFL, a professional organisation which acts as a focal point for those who work on any aspect of language and law. The site includes details of upcoming events, useful bibliographies and details of practitioners.
• Homepage of the British Association of Applied Linguistics. Information about BAAL, a professional organisation which “provides a forum for people interested in language and the applications of linguistics”. This site includes information on the association's annual conference and seminar series, it's annual book prize, special interest groups as well as a useful notice board.
• Writing for the reader. An extremely useful website designed by Dr. Gavin Budge of the University of Central England. The site is a great resource for those who are writing academic essays for the first time but also for the more experienced academic writer.