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Dr Steve Cannon In this Languages and TESOL research seminar, Dr. Steve Cannon (Faculty of Arts and Creative Industries, University of Sunderland) will be addressing the topic of awards ceremonies. These events have received little attention from Film Studies academics, most often represented simply by listings of winners in general histories. Quite apart from their marketing role for the industry as a whole, and promoting (and sometimes reviving) particular films, awards ceremonies are also themselves a space for performance and popular entertainment, reflected in their lengthy primetime broadcast slots.   In his paper, entitled 'The Politics of the Awards Ceremony: The ‘Goya’ Awards of the Spanish Film Academy, 2003 and 2004',  Steve will analyse the ways in which ceremonies also offer a space for political statements and mobilisations, echoing and expressing wider social and political struggles but also intervening in them in specific and sometimes organised ways. ...

Dr Susan Mandala has published an article in the journal Discourse, Context & Media. In ''Listening' to the Neanderthals in William Golding’s The Inheritors : A sociopragmatic approach to fictional dialogue' , Susan employs theory of mind and intentionality as analytical tools in order to ‘listen’ more closely to the Neanderthals in Golding’s 1955 novel. Paying particular attention to these characters as they express their religious beliefs, engage in storytelling, and work through interpersonal conflicts, she argues that readers are invited to infer that the Neanderthal characters are themselves inferring beings, and further demonstrate that this interpretation has implications not only for how individuals approach the novel, but for the way The Inheritors as a cultural text can be understood to participate in discursively mediating our relationship with the figure of the Neanderthal.

Dr Susan Mandala will be giving a talk in the Language Research Seminars series on Tuesday 14th November at 5pm in Reg Vardy 113 . She will explore how forms of mass media and popular culture have long been of interest to analysts for what they potentially tell us about ourselves and frequent attention has been paid to representations of gender, race, class, ethnicity and power. An equally potent but lesser explored representation is that of language learners. How are English language learners portrayed in our popular dramas, sitcoms and soap operas and what makes these portraits significant? Ranging widely over programmes such as The Archers and The Big Bang Theory , this paper explores the representation of English language learners in these texts and investigates how they are ‘storied’ in some of our most popular dramas. Dr Mandala argues that these representations frequently construct language learners as ‘other’ and asks what challenges this may pose for practice, te...

Dr Susan Mandala (Reader in Pragmatic Stylistics, TESOL) has published a chapter in Dialogue across Media , an edited collection published by John Benjamins (Mildorf and Thomas (eds.) 2017). In her chapter 'Pragmatic stylistics and dramatic dialogue', Susan views dramatic dialogue as a form of exchange that can be read on the page just as legitimately as it can be experienced on stage. Employing a pragmatic stylistic analysis linking the text on the page to her interpretation, she offers a re-reading of Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter . While for Burton (1980) Ben was 'the dominating and superior interactant,' and Gus 'the dominated and inferior one' (70), Susan argues that it is Gus who can be considered the dominating character and shows in the concluding discussion why this recalibration of power is significant for a wider understanding of the play.

Dr Neil Johnson Dr Neil Johnson (Team Leader for TESOL) will be giving a talk in the Languages Research Seminar series at 5pm on Tuesday November 22nd 2016 (Forster 301).   In the increasingly globalized and digital context of higher education, with concomitant pressure to internationalize through raised proficiency standards and greater intercultural understanding, the dominant skills-based, discreet approach to language teaching may not be optimally effective. In his presentation, entitled "Understanding language and culture through multimodal text analysis", Neil will describe the Literacy-based approach to language education that seeks to address these concerns. This approach was used to re-imagine a course for second year undergraduates at a small private university in Japan, and operationalizes both reading and writing as essentially similar processes of meaning making and design (New London Group, 1996). The course was re-structured so that learners are involved in ite...

The third seminar in the language research series will be taking place on Monday 29 th February in Forster 302 at 5.00pm . The talk will be given by a new member of TESOL staff Dr Michael Hepworth. The topic of his talk is 'Argumentation and citizenship in the adult TESOL classroom'. All welcome!

Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder c.1563 The second talk in the new series of Languages Research Seminars will be given by Dr Susan Mandala on the topic of 'ESL and EFL voices in English literature’. It takes place on Monday 8 th February at 6.00pm in FR 302 (Forster building , City Campus). All welcome!

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Kim Willis (TESOL) has co-written an article which appears in the English Language Research (ELR) Journal . Kim and her co-author Dr Ahmad Nazari (London Metropolitan University) explore perceptions of the development of group dynamics amongst a cohort of MA TESOL students. Ahmad Nazari and Kim Willis 2014. 'One Big Happy Family? An Investigation into Students' Perceptions of Group Dynamics on an MA TESOL Program' . ELR Journal . Issue 1: 105-128.