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 Creative Curriculum and Engaging Pedagogies group within the Centre for Research in Schools and Communities. Within the School of English Studies, Jane is a member of the Centre for Research in Applied Linguistics (CRAL).
Research Summary
Jane Evison's research focuses on spoken discourse. She is currently researching the pragmatics of both casual conversation and academic talk, and the discourse of podcast academic conversations. As… read more
Recent Publications
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. (In Press.)
EVISON, J. M., 2009. Academic Discourse. In: CUMMINGS, L., ed., The Pragmatics Encyclopedia Routledge. 27-29
EVISON, J.M., MCCARTHY, M.J. and O'KEEFE, A., 2007. Looking out for love and all the rest of it: vague category markers as shared social space.. In: CUTTING, J., ed., Vague Language Explored Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan. 138-157
Current Research
Jane Evison's research focuses on spoken discourse. She is currently researching the pragmatics of both casual conversation and academic talk, and the discourse of podcast academic conversations. 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.
Current Projects in the School of Education
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. Specifically, I am interested in investigating the discourse of successful learning encounters, particularly in terms of the role of extended talk.