Research Assistant (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 across a range of disciplines of writing in the exam years (GCSE, iGCSE, A Level and IB) in secondary school.

The Research Assistant 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 (BAWESS Project). The BAWESS project combines systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and corpus linguistics to analyse disciplinary literacy and writing development in secondary schools in the exam years.

This study will 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, relationships in a text.
• 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, adopting corpus linguistic and SFL to analyse the texts.

You will also have the opportunity to be involved in the work of the Language in/for Education Research group. https://www.bath.ac.uk/research-groups/language-in-and-for-education-life-research-group/

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 full time (36.5 hours per week) fixed term basis with an expected duration of 28 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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