Research

Staff research interests

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Dr Bróna Murphy

Lecturer in Language Education

Education, Teaching and Leadership (ETL)

Email: brona.murphy@ed.ac.uk

Tel: +44 (0)131 651 6408

Location:

Charteris Land

Background

Dr Bróna Murphy is a Lecturer in English Language Education at the Institute for Education, Teaching and Leadership (ETL), where she teaches at postgraduate level on the MSc TESOL, MSc Education: Language and the MSc in Applied Linguistics. Before coming to Edinburgh in 2008, Dr Murphy held posts in TESOL and sociolinguistics at the University of Limerick and University College Dublin, Ireland as well as at the Association de Formation Professionelle des Adultes (AFPA), Lille, France. Her research interests lie in spoken discourse, sociolinguistics focusing on explorations of age and gender, corpus linguistics and its applications in teacher education. She teaches and publishes in these areas as well as supervises Masters and PhD dissertations and theses. Bróna has worked with corpora since 2002 and has been involved in the creation of two one-million word corpora of Irish English: the Limerick Corpus of Irish English (LCIE) and the Limerick-Belfast Corpus of Spoken Academic English (LIBEL Case), as well as smaller sociolinguistic oriented corpora. In the exploration of such smaller corpora, she has secured funding from the British Academy (2010-2012) as well as the Carnegie Trust (2013). Bróna has also taught as a visiting scholar at the University of Extremadura, Spain and continues to engage in research with international institutions. Her most recent corpus-based publications have included a monograph in 2010 which was published with John Benjamins on Corpus Linguistics and Sociolinguistics as well as chapters in edited volumes, and articles in journals such as Corpora, the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, Intercultural Pragmatics and Classroom Discourse. Dr Murphy is a member of international research groups such as IVACS (Inter-Varietal Applied Corpus Studies) and CLAVIER (Corpus Linguistics and Language Variation) and is currently onvenor of the British Association of Applied Linguistics (BAAL) Corpus Linguistics Special Interest Group.

Qualifications:

BA (Hons) in English and French, University of Limerick, Ireland
MA in English Language Teaching
PhD in Applied Linguistics

Principal interests

Sociolinguistics (age/life-stage, gender and Irish English)
Corpus Linguistics and the use of small corpora, in particular, in sociolinguistic research
Pragmatics - especially variational pragmatics and how it combines with sociolinguistics and corpus-based insights to shed light on the impact of age and gender on naturally-occurring discourse
TESOL and Teacher Education - reflective practice and language teachers

I am happy to supervise research in these areas. Current PhD supervisees include:

Exploring vague language as used by Japanese learners of English in an academic context: A corpus-based approach - Tomoko Watanabe (and supervised with Dr Joan Cutting)

Teachers' lives: A life history narrative inquiry into Chinese college English teachers' professional development in the context of Chinese culture- Ling Meng (and supervised with Prof. Morwenna Griffiths)

Investigating adjustments for international students in university lectures - Marta Szczepaniak (and supervised with Prof. Tony Lynch)

Investigating metacognitive discourse awareness in second language listening - Alan Huang (and supervised with Dr Charles Anderson, Dr Pauline Sangster)

I have supervised over 40 Masters dissertations on a range of topics to do with second language teaching/learning; corpus linguistics and academic discourse/sociolinguistics.

Current and recent research

I am currently working on analysing the impact of age and life-stage on private conversations which take place in male heterosexual friendships. The study combines the use of corpus linguistics to gain answers and insights into sociolinguistic questions while also drawing on variational pragmatics. The study aims to tease out and face the methodological issues which arise when corpus lingusitics and sociolinguistics collide.

Selected recent national and international conferences:

Title: ‘The hijab is so we can be in society without them looking at us as sex objects’: Exploring the interrelationship between gender identities, sexuality and discourse in Muslim women talk
Conference: International Gender and Language Association (IGALA) Conference, Brazil.
Year: June 20^th-22^nd 2012

Title: ‘He’s no Omar Sharif but he's a good man’: Exploring gender-related humour and sexuality in television discourse
Conference: International Gender and Language Association (IGALA) Conference, Brazil (with Barbara Orfano, Federal University of São João del-Rei, Brazil and Maria Palma-Fahey, Shannon College, Ireland)
Year: June 20^th-22^nd 2012

Title: ‘Sure she's just the same as all the women. Give them a centimetre and they take a kilometre’: Exploring Gender and Humour in a Corpus of Irish English Soap Opera Discourse (with María Palma-Fahy, Shannon).
Conference: British Association of Applied Linguistics (BAAL) 2011, Bristol
Year: September 1st-3rd 2011

Title: 'Jesus Christ Almighty': Investigating Religious Swearwords in Male Talk
Conference: Panel Presentation at the Sociolinguistics Symposium 18, University of Southampton
Year: 1st September - 4th September 2011

Title: 'Oh you cow': Women and Insults in Irish English
Conference: Linguistic Impoliteness and Rudeness II, Lancaster University
Year: 30th June - 2nd July 2009

Title: 'Maybe, perhaps, kind of, sort of': Hedging and Age and Gender Variation.
Conference: 5th International Gender and Language Association Conference, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Year: 15 - 18th May 2008

Publications

Publications list for Dr Bróna Murphy

Teaching

Semester 1:

-Text Discourse and Language Teaching

- Language and the Learner

- TESOL Methodology

- Research Methods

Semester 2:

- Corpus Linguistics

- Corpus Linguistics and Language Teaching