Prf Theresa Lillis

The production and use of written texts is a high stakes activity in professional social work, playing a central role in all decisions about actions and services for people and at the same time used to evaluate a social worker’s professional competence. However, little empirical research has been carried out to date on the writing demands and practices of everyday social work – and their changing nature given the changing technologies being used. The proposed project seeks to address this gap in existing knowledge base by answering the following interrelated questions: what are the institutional writing demands of contemporary social work? what are the writing practices of professional social workers? how are the how are writing demands and practices shaping the nature of professional social work? To answer these questions the project focuses on three local authorities in the UK, exploring the range of written texts required and the writing practices of 50 social workers. It uses an integrated language methodology, including ethnographic description, discourse analysis using corpus software and the detailed tracking of the production of texts, in order to: map the types of writing that are required and carried out during the course of everyday practice; quantify the amount of writing that is being done and how writing is being managed alongside other commitments; identify the technologies mediating specific writing practices and the extent to which these enable or constrain effective writing and communication; track the trajectories of texts relating to specific cases; identify the writing challenges that social workers face, the problems identified and solutions adopted. Findings will be of direct relevance to nine key groups of beneficiaries: 1) academics in the fields of applied linguistics and literacy studies, particularly the subfield of work-based literacies; 2) professional social workers; 3) service users and carers; 4) social work agencies; 5) social work education and training providers; 6) social care inspection bodies; 7) policy makers on health and social care at local, national and international levels; 8) professional workers in other sectors where there are significant writing and recording demands, e.g. health, policing; 9) the general public.

This programme of work, 'The sociolinguistics of writing in a global context', consolidates and extends my academic research over the past 10 years. It takes the practices and politics of writing as its empirical focus and is therefore located within the disciplines of applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, whilst also cutting across a number of disciplinary domains nationally and internationally, notably English for Academic Purposes (UK and internationally), rhetoric and composition (US), New Literacy Studies (UK and US), academic literacies and linguistic ethnography (UK, Europe, South Africa). The programme is organized around two interrelated goals: the first centres on a longitudinal empirical study, the second involves scholarship on writing within the disciplines of applied linguistics and sociolinguistics. The first goal is to develop a comprehensive and synthesized analysis of a large and varied amount of data drawn from a longitudinal study on the politics and practices of academic writing in a global context. The overarching question that the study seeks to explore is as follows: in what ways is the dominance of English influencing academic knowledge production and exchange in the twenty first century? Data comprises text, ethnographic and corpus data. Text and ethnographic data are drawn from 4 national contexts (Hungary, Slovakia, Spain and Portugal) and comprise: case studies of 50 multilingual scholars and their writing experiences and practices over a period of between 5-7 years; 900 written academic texts; 250 literacy and text based interviews; approximately 1000 email exchanges; 500 sets of correspondence around texts (by reviewers, editors, colleagues); observation notes, diaries and photographs drawn from a total of 18 visits to each site; substantial documentary sources such as departmental and national policies relating to research evaluation. The corpus data is a 1 million word specialist corpus of English medium academic journal articles drawn from Anglophone and non-Anglophone publishing contexts. The amount and range of data collected is unparalleled by any other existing study focusing on academic writing for publication. The second goal of the programme is to generate a state of the art review of existing empirical and theoretical work on written texts/writing within the disciplines of applied linguistics and sociolinguistics and to offer a reconfigured model of written texts/writing in a globalised world. This would involve drawing on insights generated from the longitudinal empirical study and taking account of important shifts occurring as a result of globalisation, including changing technologies, greater transnational mobility, and the increasingly multimodal nature of 'written' communication. The programme of work would be organized around the following key activities; the writing of two books (one co-authored, one single authored); the organizing of two international seminars paralleling major themes of the books and with the goal of setting a future international research agenda; the writing of two journal articles; the targeting of potential users groups of key aspects of the research, including editors of international journals, language consultants and national and international research and curriculum bodies. Publishing contracts have already been secured for the two books with Routledge and Edinburgh University Press.