Research Associate (Disciplinary Literacy)

About the role

The post represents an exciting opportunity to join a ground-breaking team that aims to develop the first ever corpus of disciplinary writing in the exam years (GCSE, iGCSE, A Level and IB exams) in secondary school.

The Research Associate will work closely with the project team on the £970K UKRI-funded project Disciplinary Literacy & Corpus-Based Pedagogy: The BAWESS (British Academic Written English Secondary School) Corpus (The BAWESS Project). The BAWESS project combines systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and corpus linguistics to analyse disciplinary literacy and writing development in the exam years.

This BAWESS corpus aims to examine disciplinary language patterns from:

• Above, examining the genres (the goal, social purpose & stages) of texts students are required to write.
• Around, analysing the structure and the relationships between sections, paragraphs, and the discourse semantics of texts.
• Below, investigating the lexical and grammatical choices (lexico-grammar) that are found in different texts and disciplines.

The result of this multifaceted analysis will provide unique and systematic insights into the patterns, structures and language choices of effective writing in the exam years in different disciplines. Please see the project website for more information on planned research and knowledge exchange activities (https://www.bath.ac.uk/projects/disciplinary-literacy-corpus-based-pedagogy-the-bawess-corpus-project/).

You will work with the Team and will support the development and analysis of the corpus, using corpus linguistics and SFL to analyse the texts.

As a member of Research Staff at the University of Bath, you will be encouraged to take up a minimum of 10 days professional development pro rata per year.

This role is offered on a part time (29.2 hours per week, 0.8FTE) fixed term basis with an expected duration of 36 months. 

About you 

We are looking for somebody who is passionate about the topic area, is confident at engaging with teachers and learners, has knowledge of SFL and/or corpus linguistics, and has strong discourse analysis research skills.

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