Jane Evison
Lecturer, Faculty of Social Sciences
Contact
Biography
Jane Evison has been teaching postgraduate students at the School of Education since 2002. She has a PhD in English Studies from the University of Nottingham. This doctoral research on turn-openers in academic talk was supervised by Michael McCarthy, and had its focus on the pragmatic and interactional features of informal spoken language in university lectures, seminars and tutorials. Jane continues to be interested in spoken language, and is currently researching the discourse of podcasting in higher educational contexts and the use of multi-screen technologies in university seminars. She has wide-ranging experience of teaching both English and Applied Linguistics, and of teacher education, and her current teaching centres on applied linguistics, discourse analysis, spoken grammar and corpus linguistics, and TESOL methodology. Her career overseas includes time spent as Director of Studies of a language institute in Oman, as well as experience in the UAE, Australia and New Zealand. Jane has also worked with James P. Lantolf and his team at the Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research (CALPER) at Pennsylvania State University on the development of learner corpora and the assessment of advanced proficiency. Within the School of Education, Jane is a member of the Learning Sciences Research Institute.
Research Summary
Jane Evison's research focuses on spoken discourse. She is currently researching the pragmatics of both casual conversation and academic talk.. As well as being a member of BAAL and IATEFL, she is… read more
Recent Publications
EVISON, J. and WHITE, G., 2011. ‘Buy-lah!’ The English between the music on Malaysian radio stations – a case of ELF as a commodity?. In: COGO, A. and ARCHIBALD, A., eds., Latest trends in ELF research: Proceedings of the 2nd International ELF conference, Southampton, 2009. Cambridge Scholars' Press. 93 - 112
EVISON, J. M., 2010. What are the basics of analysing a corpus?. In: MCCARTHY, M. J. AND O'KEEFFE, A., ed., The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics Routledge. 122-135
EVISON, J. M., 2009. Academic Discourse. In: CUMMINGS, L., ed., The Pragmatics Encyclopedia Routledge. 27-29
Current Research
Jane Evison's research focuses on spoken discourse. She is currently researching the pragmatics of both casual conversation and academic talk.. As well as being a member of BAAL and IATEFL, she is part of the IVACS (Inter-Varietal Applied Corpus Studies ) research group, made up of researchers from Nottingham, the University of Limerick, the University of Newcastle and the University of Technology, Sydney. She is also a Project Affiliate at CALPER (Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research), located at Pennsylvania State University.
Past Research
Jane has carried out commissioned research projects on the discourse features of spoken and written academic discourse for the Educational Testing Service in the USA, and analysis of paired speaking tests for Cambridge ESOL. She has provided research support for the Cambridge Grammar of English (Carter and McCarthy, 2006) and the Touchstone series of coursebooks. She has also researched vague language use in a range of contexts including casual conversation, academic discourse, media and business talk. Her PhD research incorporated both quantitative and qualitative analysis of spoken academic discourse in the humanities, using casual conversation as a benchmark.
Future Research
I am keen to build on my earlier linguistic research into the discourse of higher education and that of casual conversation. I am interested in the role of talk in all kinds of learning environments, and the nature and functions of conversation.