John Mckenny

Contact

• work
• john.mckenny@nottingham.edu.cn

Expertise Summary

I hold a BA and an MA in Mental and Moral Science (Philosophy) from Trinity College, Dublin; a Postgraduate Certificate in Education from Cambridge University; the Royal Society of Arts Diploma in Teaching English as a Foreign Language to Adults; an MSc in the Teaching of English for Specific Purposes from Aston University, Birmingham and a Ph.D. from the School of English, University of Leeds.

I have taught English as a Foreign Language and English for Academic Purposes in Greece, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Hungary, the Sultanate of Oman and the UK for 30 years since 1978. Since 1987, I began to work also as a school manager, teacher educator and English for Specific Purposes course designer. I was Senior Lecturer in Linguistics and the Methodology of Language Teaching at Viseu Polytechnic Institute in Portugal between 1991 and 2002 and in the same period I was a visiting lecturer in Business English at the Catholic University of Portugal.

I worked for five years as a Senior Lecturer at Northumbria University in the UK. I helped to set up and then taught on the MA in Applied Linguistics and the BA in English Language Studies. During the same period, I co-ordinated three 14-week pre-sessional summer schools at the Northumbria University English Language Centre. My Ph.D. thesis at the School of English, Leeds University was entitled A corpus-based investigation of the phraseology in various genres of written English with applications to the teaching of English for academic purposes.

I am interested in approaches to teaching and testing which take the phraseological dimension of language into account. I am currently co-editing with Tometro Hopkins (of Florida International University) a volume called Englishes in the British Isles to be published by Continuum International in January 2011. This book, the first of a 15-volume series on World Englishes, is a new survey of the regional varieties of English spoken in Britain and Ireland.

Teaching Summary

Teaching

Undergraduate

BA English Language and Linguistics Modules:

Spoken English: Form and Function

Postgraduate

MA Applied Linguistics Modules:

Globalization of English

Text, Talk and Corpus Analysis

Research Summary

Principal Research Interests

My research interests include contrastive rhetoric, corpus and concordancing applications to the teaching of English for Academic Purposes, naturalness and well-formedness in written academic prose, corpus-driven stylistics, the teaching and testing of vocabulary, EFL/EAP/ESP course and syllabus design, needs analysis, teacher education and development, lexicology, discourse analysis, genre analysis, phraseology, formulaic sequences, construction grammar and Irish studies.

Recent Research Projects

I made a corpus analysis of journal articles written in English for publication by Portuguese academics. This study focused on the distinctive features of the written English of the Portuguese writers compared with the published work of writers whose L1 is English. I investigated the extent to which a corpus methodology can contribute to contrastive rhetoric and discourse analysis. The first outcome of this research was a paper, (co-authored with Karen Bennett): Polishing Papers for Publication: Palimpsests or Procrustean Beds? given at the 8th international Teaching and Language Corpora conference (TALC8) conference in Lisbon, July 2008. An enriched and extended version of this paper was published in the journalEnglish Text Construction Autumn, 2009. Since coming to UNNC, I have begun the compilation of a longitudinal corpus of written and spoken academic English. The multimodal UNNCorpus will grow as the university grows to encompass robust samples of all genres of academic communication. The written sub-corpus currently stands at 500,000 written words and is growing steadily with students' contributions of their work.

I am preparing with Brian Hilton a paper for the Journal of International Business studies using a new methodology of text mining large corpora of journal articles to test the development of concepts and theories and the consistency with which authors use these constructs.

I will publish a more linguistics oriented version of this in the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics.

1995 'Needs Analysis Revisited'. In The Proceedings of the Sixth Hispano- Portuguese International Conference on Languages for Specific Purposes

1996 'LSP Teachers: 'Polymaths or Chameleons: Metaphors to teach by'. Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of tertiary level language teachers. University of Evora, Portugal

1996 'Ireland' Millenium No. 4 (URL: http://www.ipv.pt/millenium/Ireland_esf4.htm)

1997 'Teaching and Learning English in the Primary School: Justifying Outcomes'. In Proceedings of the Cultures for Learning Conference jointly published by Nottingham University and Escola Superior de Educação de Castelo Branco

1998 'Confessions of a wandering scholar.' Millennium Jul. 1998 No 1 (URL: http://www.ipv.pt/millenium/mckenny11.htm)

1998 Cal a novel by Bernard MacLaverty. A translation from English into Portuguese

1998 An Online Dictionary of English Loan Words and Phrases in Portuguese (URL: www.ipv.pt/anglicismos)

2001 'A case study of a translation of King Solomon's Mines by Eça de Queiroz' In Proceedings of the Symposium on Translation Studies 1999 Viseu Polytechnic.

2003 'Seeing the wood and the trees: Reconciling findings from discourse and lexical analysis'. Paper at Corpus Linguistics 2003 Conference, University of Lancaster. Published by University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language Technical Papers Volume 16-Special Edition. Lancaster

2003 'Stance and spin in academic writing' In Lagerwerf, L., Spooren, W. and Degand, L. (eds.) Determination of Information and Tenor in Texts: Proceedings of MAD conference (Multiple Approaches to Discourse) . Münster: Nodus Publikationen.115-137

2003 'Jonathan Swift's prescience: The dean as precursor of corpus linguistics.' Journal of Language and Literature

2005 'Content analysis of dogmatism compared with corpus analysis of epistemic stance in student essays'. Information Design Journal + Document Design, volume 13, number 1

2009 (co-authored with Karen Bennett): 'Critical and corpus approaches to English academic text revision: A case study of articles by Portuguese humanities scholars' English Text Construction (2) 2. Amsterdam: John Benjamins

2009 (co-authored with M.Gillon Dowens) Training Self and Peer Evaluation Skills -a movie paints a million words. EDULEARN09. Barcelona, Spain. ISBN 978-84-612-9802-0

2010 (co-authored with Karen Bennett): 'Polishing Papers for Publication: Palimpsests or Procrustean Beds?' In Frankenberg-Garcia, A., Flowerdew, L. & Aston, G. (eds.) New Trends in Teaching and Language Corpora. London: Continuum.

2011 A corpus study of the phraseology of written argumentative English. Frankfurt: Lambert Academic Publishing ISBN 978-3-8383-7

2011 'Divergências na Perceçấo da Estadia dos Portugueses na Cidade de Ningbo no Século 16 Baseadas no Livro Peregrinações de Fernão Mendes Pinto'. Paper presented at the XV Colloquium of the Lusophone World, Macau Polytechnic 11-15 April 2011.

2011 (co-authored with HUANG Dawang and YANG Chunsheng) 'Local SCI- indexed papers would suffice! Pragmatism, transposition of discourse strategies and Chinese academics'. Paper presented at The 16th World Congress of Applied Linguistics (Beijing, China, 23-28^Aug.Aug. 2011)

2012 (in press) Englishes of The British Isles Volume 1 of 12-volume series on World Englishes co-edited with T. Hopkins. London: Continuum International.