Language and literacy in education

Language and Literacies in Education is a key topic in the Language and Literacies Research Cluster. Researchers and students work in various areas relating to literacies in education (primary, secondary and higher), literacies in everyday lives and in professional contexts.

Past and present studies have focused on writing in different disciplines (e.g. history, geography, history of science, health and social care, business and management); digital literacies in teacher development; writing by UK and international students at different levels of study; literacy practices in digital environments; developing teacher literacies through participation in e-reading groups; the writing for publication of scholars working in non-Anglophone contexts; academics’ professional reading practices, writing in professional social work practice and higher education pedagogies around writing. Methodologies include ethnography, multimodal analysis, corpus analysis, systemic functional linguistic analysis and discourse approaches, including critical discourse analysis and poststructuralist approaches.

Entry requirements

Minimum 2:1 undergraduate degree (or equivalent) and an MA or research methods training at MA level (or equivalent). If you are not a UK citizen, you may need to prove your knowledge of English.

Potential research projects

• Academic literacies (including literacies in further and adult education, undergraduate, taught postgraduate, vocational and doctoral education)
• The sociolinguistics of writing
• Writing for publication
• Digital literacies in post-compulsory learning contexts
• Writing in English as a lingua franca context
• Writing in social and healthcare professional contexts, including social work practice
• Writing in business and management education
• Literacy practices of higher education teachers and researchers
• Contemporary workplace literacies

Current/recent research projects

• Students’ writing and transitions from school to university
• An exploration of the experiences of Japan-based English Language Teachers Writing for Academic Publication
• Explorations of student academic literacy practices in digital multimodal disciplinary contexts in South African vocational higher education
• Women’s academic writing and widening participation in higher education in the UK
• Learning identity, belonging, and writing in a Foundation Year context 
• An exploration of the everyday and college-assessed literacy practices of further education students
• Multimodal literacy and education in the context of new technologies
• Russian scholars' writing for publication in Russian and English

Potential supervisors

• Professor Regine Hampel
• Dr Miriam Hauck
• Dr Lucy Henning
• Professor Kristina Hultgren
• Dr Maria Leedham
• Dr Prithvi Shrestha
• Dr Ursula Stickler
• Dr Jackie Tuck

Fees and funding

PhD fees

Professional doctorate fees

Some of our research students are funded via the Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership or The Grand Union Doctoral Training Partnership; others are self-funded.

For detailed information about fees and funding, visit Fees and studentships.

To see current funded studentship vacancies across all research areas, see Current studentships.

Links

• School of Languages and Applied Linguistics
• Languages and Literacies | Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies
• Learners and Learning | Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies
• Learning Futures | Institute of Educational Technology