Milton Keynes
Regno Unito
Dear DiscourseNet friends and discourseanalysis.net users,
Would you like to pursue doctoral training in the area of discourse? If you have a good idea and a proposal, now is the time to think about how to apply.
The Open University is a highly regarded international research institution, renowned for fostering the academic ambitions of dedicated researchers. With its long-term focus on independent and cutting-edge research, the School of Languages and Applied Linguistics is among the most prominent research establishments in the interdisciplinary area of Language Studies. More than 50 academic staff of the School of Languages and Applied Linguistics are currently engaged in research and have received significant academic acclaim through their involvement in numerous research projects both at home and abroad. Our campus is located in Milton Keynes (UK), which is about half an hour by train from London.
As such, we are delighted to receive applications to our doctoral programmes from highly motivated international and national students interested in pursuing research in our fields of expertise:
- language as a social and cultural practice (including discourse analysis, conversation interaction, sociolinguistics, sociopragmatics, media and technology, literacy studies, narrative and literary analysis, translation, interculturalism)
- language education and learning (including online language teaching, teacher training, digital pedagogies, education policies, language assessment and testing, classroom interaction, phonology and phonetics)
We deal with language broadly understood as an activity in various social arenas, notably language in education and higher education, in the workplace and the professions, in politics and the media, in the cultural field. Our doctoral students receive the latest theoretical and methodological developments in linguistics, the social sciences and the educational field. They are trained in a broad array of quantitative and qualitative methods (e.g. eyetracking, ethnography, conversation analysis and corpus analysis).
We award the academic degrees of PhD (Doctorate in Philosophy) and EdD (Doctorate in Education) based on the submission of a thesis and a successful viva. Full-time PhD students are based on campus while EdD students work at a distance. All doctoral projects are supervised by experienced and dedicated academic staff, who have made a name for themselves in the scientific community via a wealth of national and international publications and research projects. In addition to writing and defending their thesis, doctoral researchers will also have the opportunity to attend our research group meetings and lectures by eminent national and international professors, providing them with additional valuable insights, and illustrating an international network in the field of research. In times of COVID-19 restrictions, the Open University as a distance teaching institution has moved supervision and methods training online seamlessly. An example is our PhD methods week: https://phdmethodstraining.education.
You will be part of a large community of research students on campus who have worked on topics such as
- Gesture in multimodal language learner interaction via videoconferencing on mobile devices
- Impact of the Secondary Education Examination (English) on Students and Parents in Nepal
- Exploring the Implementation of Online Non-Formal Project-Based Language Learning in the Indonesian Context
- An Integrative Approach to Family Language Policy Experiences: The Case of French-English Bilingual Families in the UK
- Learning Through Vicarious Participation in Online Language Tutorials
- Freelance Language Teachers' Professional Development On ... And With ... And Through Twitter
- The Relationship between Thai Culture and the Learning and Teaching of English in North-eastern Thailand.
Submitting an application for doctoral studies takes time and patience. If you want to pursue your project with us and you are not sure who might be an appropriate supervisor, we invite you to send us your expression of interest, an initial draft of your project (no more than 2000 words) and your CV at your earliest convenience. A good proposal shows you have a clear vision of the research topic and will help frame your project and thesis. It should indicate the questions, aims and objectives of your research, the importance of your research question to the field, the research methodology and design you propose, and the expected outcomes/hypotheses.
Once received, our team in the Faculty and the School will evaluate your proposal and get back to you. Finding the right researcher to become your supervisor is a very important part of the application. Unless you already have somebody in mind, we will try to find supervisor with relevant expertise for you. You may turn in your full application for a doctoral degree between 1st of November and 31st of January; the starting date is normally in October. The university helps with visa and immigration questions.
If you would like to discuss your research proposal with a member of staff, please get in touch: WELS-Student-Enquiries@open.ac.uk. For more information on application entry requirements, deadlines and fees, please consult our research degrees prospectus: http://www.open.ac.uk/postgraduate/research-degrees
There is a limited number of fully funded PhD studentships which normally include fees and maintenance for three years, depending on satisfactory progress. Anticipated stipend for 2020/2021 is approximately £15,544 per annum. Funding may be available from our Faculty or one of our Doctoral Training Partnerships (Grand Union, Open-Oxford-Cambridge, deadlines are usually in early January). For more information on these funding opportunities, please go to http://wels.open.ac.uk/research/centres/creet/postgraduate/phd-studentships, http://www.open.ac.uk/about/employment/vacancies/phd-studentships-arts-and-humanities-open-universityahrc-studentships
Kind regards,
Professor Johannes Angermuller, Open University