Supporting international PhD writers – are pastoral duties part of the package?

This article aims to examine the experiences of international PhD students, highlight problems specific to these students, and outline potential solutions. The paper is based on my experience of teaching, observation and informal conversations with such students (Arabic, East-Asian, and, to a lesser degree, European) over a six-year period of teaching English for Academic Purposes (EAP). First, I argue that doctoral students constitute a distinct group of learners for academic, language, social, and psychological reasons. I base this conclusion on my own experience of teaching PhD students, but this view is also supported by literature. In this article I discuss problems specific to this group, often connected with the change of their social role from lecturer to student, cultural differences in academic relationships, language insecurities, separation from the family and loneliness

Integrating Corpus analysis into everyday classroom practice

Language teaching is an exciting area for applying corpus linguistics. This article gives a glimpse into practical applications of Concordancers in academic writing and provides examples of Concordance exercises that can be used in the classroom to introduce students to working with corpora

Representations of child sexual abuse in Jamaica:A corpus-assisted discourse study of popular new media.

News media shape public opinion on social issues such as child sexual abuse (CSA), using particular language to foreground, marginalize or legitimize certain viewpoints. Given the prevalence of CSA and the impact of violence against children in Jamaica, there is a need to examine the representation of children and their experience of violence in the news media, which remain the main source of information about such abuse for much of the population. The study aims to analyze accounts of CSA in Jamaican newspapers in order to show how different representations impact public understanding of CSA. This study offers a new perspective around child abuse by using an eight-million word corpus from articles over a three-year period (2018- 2020). The study argues that media reports often fail to conceptualise and represent accurately children who have experienced abuse. Representations of children are generic, their experiences often reduced to statistical summaries. Corpus analysis uncovered the use of terms which normalize sexual abuse. From the reader’s perspective, there was little emotional connection to the child or the child’s experience. The newspapers rarely report first-hand survivors’ experience of abuse, depriving these children of a voice. Instead, a marked preference is given to institutional voices. An issue of concern is a tendency to sensationalism with disproportionate attention given to cases involving celebrities. By exposing these problems, the authors hope that news media in Jamaica can play a more positive role in heightening awareness around child abuse and allowing the voices of victims/ survivors to be heard

Representations of Child Sexual Abuse in Jamaica

News media shape public opinion on social issues such as child sexual abuse (CSA), using particular language to foreground, marginalize or legitimize certain viewpoints. Given the prevalence of CSA and the impact of violence against children in Jamaica, there is a need to examine the representation of children and their experience of violence in the news media, which remain the main source of information about such abuse for much of the population. The study aims to analyze accounts of CSA in Jamaican newspapers in order to show how different representations impact public understanding of CSA. This study offers a new perspective around child abuse by using an eight-million word corpus from articles over a three-year period (2018- 2020). The study argues that media reports often fail to conceptualise and represent accurately children who have experienced abuse. Representations of children are generic, their experiences often reduced to statistical summaries. Corpus analysis uncovered the use of terms which normalize sexual abuse. From the reader’s perspective, there was little emotional connection to the child or the child’s experience. The newspapers rarely report first-hand survivors’ experience of abuse, depriving these children of a voice. Instead, a marked preference is given to institutional voices. An issue of concern is a tendency to sensationalism with disproportionate attention given to cases involving celebrities. By exposing these problems, the authors hope that news media in Jamaica can play a more positive role in heightening awareness around child abuse and allowing the voices of victims/ survivors to be heard