LPL_1 Language in professional life About this free course This free course is an adapted extract from the Open University course . This version of the content may include video, images and interactive content that may not be optimised for your device. You can experience this free course as it was originally designed on OpenLearn, the home of free learning from The Open University – There you’ll also be able to track your progress via your activity record, which you can use to demonstrate your learning.

First published 2026. Unless otherwise stated, copyright © 2026 The Open University, all rights reserved. Intellectual property Unless otherwise stated, this resource is released under the terms of the Creative Commons Licence v4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/deed.en. Within that The Open University interprets this licence in the following way: www.open.edu/openlearn/about-openlearn/frequently-asked-questions-on-openlearn. Copyright and rights falling outside the terms of the Creative Commons Licence are retained or controlled by The Open University. Please read the full text before using any of the content. We believe the primary barrier to accessing high-quality educational experiences is cost, which is why we aim to publish as much free content as possible under an open licence. If it proves difficult to release content under our preferred Creative Commons licence (e.g. because we can’t afford or gain the clearances or find suitable alternatives), we will still release the materials for free under a personal end-user licence. This is because the learning experience will always be the same high quality offering and that should always be seen as positive – even if at times the licensing is different to Creative Commons. When using the content you must attribute us (The Open University) (the OU) and any identified author in accordance with the terms of the Creative Commons Licence. The Acknowledgements section is used to list, amongst other things, third party (Proprietary), licensed content which is not subject to Creative Commons licensing. Proprietary content must be used (retained) intact and in context to the content at all times. The Acknowledgements section is also used to bring to your attention any other Special Restrictions which may apply to the content. For example there may be times when the Creative Commons Non-Commercial Sharealike licence does not apply to any of the content even if owned by us (The Open University). In these instances, unless stated otherwise, the content may be used for personal and non-commercial use. We have also identified as Proprietary other material included in the content which is not subject to Creative Commons Licence. These are OU logos, trading names and may extend to certain photographic and video images and sound recordings and any other material as may be brought to your attention. Unauthorised use of any of the content may constitute a breach of the terms and conditions and/or intellectual property laws. We reserve the right to alter, amend or bring to an end any terms and conditions provided here without notice. All rights falling outside the terms of the Creative Commons licence are retained or controlled by The Open University. Head of Intellectual Property, The Open University Week 1: Exploring the language of branding To start this course, take a look at the following slideshow of logos. You’re probably familiar with many of the items in the slideshow. Think for a moment on what one or two of these mean to you. You may have thought that ‘Ferrari’ denotes status symbols, ‘BBC’ conjures up solid reliability whereas IKEA has a practical vibe. All of these images and words in the figure are examples of brands. But what makes up a ‘brand’? Isn’t it mainly about the colours and logo? Where does language fit in? And is grammar important? In this first week of the course, you’ll learn about practical and professional applications of language analysis in one particular area of commerce: branding. After some basics on branding, you’ll listen to an interview with a UK-based branding consultant, Chris West, who discusses how and why he uses language analysis in his day-to-day work. You’ll also have the opportunity to do some brand analysis yourself, giving you a taste of what you can do if you know your grammar. By the end of this week, you should be able to: begin to understand the language around developing a brand see how language analysis can be a powerful tool within business understand some useful concepts in language analysis.

This is a wordle comprising the following words – predominantly in various shades of green and brown – written in lower case: voice, identity, advertising, branding, speak, business, tone, marketing, verbal, quality, images, brand, communication, product and customers.

When people hear ‘branding’, they don’t normally associate it with language. The more obvious aspects of branding are probably the visual ones, such as logos, colour palettes, tag lines, images and TV adverts (see Murcia Bielsa, 2012). However, language is increasingly being seen in business contexts as the key to successful branding (e.g. Barattin and Latusi, 2025; Simmons, 2006). Activity 1 What is a brand? Allow about 10 minutes At this point, it’s useful to reflect on what a brand actually is. Without looking back at the figure in the previous section, think of six or seven brands that you’ve encountered in the last 24 hours and write down the names in the box below and what your interaction with them was. Do they have anything in common? Here is an example list: My list includes Google (general internet searches), Chat GPT (while talking to a student whose research draws on Gen AI), Hewlett Packard (my work laptop), The Open University (my employer), Aldi (they made the soup I had for lunch), Oxford City Council (I emailed about a tree growing out of the pavement in front of my house), and BBC iPlayer (for the series I’m currently watching on TV). I could go on... The interesting thing is that, on the face of it, these have relatively little in common with each other. Some of them are to do with technology (Google, ChatGPT), some provide services (Google, Oxford City Council, BBC iPlayer, The Open University), some provide physical items or products (Hewlett Packard, Aldi), but others may encompass many products, physical or otherwise (Google). Some of these are also names of companies (Google, Hewlett Packard) or charities (BBC, The Open University), but others are part of much larger companies (ChatGPT is owned by Open AI). This means that a brand is not quite synonymous with a given product or service and it is also not necessarily the same as a company. In fact, ‘brand’ is notoriously difficult to define. It is an intangible asset (something of value that is not a physical thing), designed to attract consumer attention, and to encapsulate as well as shape expectations, emotions and attitudes associated with a particular company, product or service (de Chernatony, 2009). It’s also inextricably linked with an identity or personality that is created by and for the brand (Murcia Bielsa, 2012) which helps to differentiate the product from others of the same type (Larsen, 2023). But how is this done? Specifically: How do you attract consumer attention and capture as well as shape the associations with a company, product or service? How can you create a personality for something that is not human? Answering these questions is the domain of branding, which in addition to visual elements such as design scheme, colour palettes and fonts also, crucially, includes words. In this week, the focus is of course on these words: the role of language in branding, or verbal identity. Verbal identity is essentially the brand character as expressed in the language produced by and associated with the brand (via, for example, websites, customer service calls, social media posts and customer-facing emails). It can be seen to complement visual identity, although the two often overlap and interact in interesting ways, for example in typography or websites. A helpful analogy might be to think about novels or films: what a character says, precisely how they say it, and how they build and maintain relationships with other characters using language, contributes to their ‘personality’ – how we as audiences interpret their character and how we feel towards them (see Culpeper, 2001). In the same way that the language of fictional characters contributes to their characterisation, the language (verbal and visual) that brands use largely determines the personality that we attribute to them – this is often referred to as ‘verbal identity’ or ‘brand tone of voice’ (e.g. Barattin and Latusi, 2025; Delin, 2005) in the business world. This, of course, involves figuratively thinking of brands as if they were people. For example, a brand that uses lots of verbs denoting vigorous activity (e.g. run, soar, jump) might be seen as dynamic; while a brand relying more on verbs denoting mental processes (e.g. believe, stand for, value) would be seen as more thoughtful or reflective. In the audio that you are about to listen to, Chris West, founder of branding specialists Verbal Identity talks about verbal identity and how he uses language analysis in his work. Activity 2 The need for verbal identity Allow about 10 minutes Listen to Chris’s description of verbal identity at the beginning of the audio. Make notes as you listen using the box below. Please note that this audio was recorded in 2013 so some references may now be out of date. CHRIS WEST My name is Chris West. I’m the founder of a brand-language agency called ‘Verbal Identity’. And we say that we create language which creates value for our customers. So, we’re called ‘Verbal Identity’, but the discipline of verbal identity is a distinct function within branding. It’s the way a brand uses language to make itself known and to stand for something. And the easiest way of understanding it, perhaps, is to say that verbal identity is the complement to the visual identity of a brand. So, most people will know a brand logo, a brand colour palette, and a brand’s font, and they’re consistent, and they help people understand what the brand stands for. In the same way we would look at language that the brand uses and makes sure that that language is consistent and distinct. The concept of ‘verbal identity’, as a discipline in branding, is relatively new. When I started in ad agencies at the beginning of the 90s, I was at Saatchi and Saatchi, one of the biggest and best ad agencies, and we were working on British Airways. And you didn’t really need a strong idea of a verbal identity for the brand. Because you would have a great piece of communication, because maybe the idea was great, or maybe the photography was great. So, tone of voice or verbal identity, you didn’t really need to have, because the ad would stand out anyway. What we see now is nine out of ten channels that a brand communicates with a consumer are dominated by language. So it might be the email newsletter, it might be the customer-satisfaction survey, it might be a consumer looking for the consensus of opinion on social media. So, suddenly, a brand needs to understand: How does language work? How does language allow us to build bridges with people? How does language work to persuade people? INTERVIEWER So those are the three parts to verbal identity? CHRIS WEST Yeah. So the three parts to verbal identity are: tone of voice; the specific language that would be used – the key phrases, the key words; but also the messaging structure, as well. So, normally, when we talk to people about verbal identity, they say ‘What, like visual identity? The word equivalent?’ We say ‘Yes. Absolutely.’ And they say ‘Well, where does that make a difference?’ And, unfortunately, the answer that most people understand is ‘Innocent Smoothies’, because suddenly a mashed-up fruit product had this voice that would speak to you, and it’d be slightly cheeky and it’d say ‘Drop in at Innocent Towers’. And the reason I say ‘unfortunately’ is that the best example of verbal identity was created about 15 years ago. So I sometimes think that our industry really needs a boot up the bum. Because we’re referencing something that happened 12 years ago. Chris says that, at the beginning of the 1990s, it was easier for great pieces of communication to stand out than it is now, so they didn’t need strong verbal identity. Do you agree with Chris? Why do you think it might be harder for communications to stand out nowadays? One reason Chris mentions why it might be harder for communications to stand out nowadays is that the number of different ways that communication between brands and consumers happens has increased and diversified – and has become more dialogic. Consumers are able to respond to and initiate communication with the brand rather than it only happening the other way round. Most of this communication is also more language based (i.e. more verbal). Another reason might also be the overall increase in the number of pieces of communication that people in general are exposed to. Think about all the pop ups, ads, images, soundbites, emails, banners, and so on, that you encounter every day. It becomes harder to stand out when the environment is so crowded. In the rest of the audio, Chris talks about how he uses language analysis in his work, and specifically, corpus linguistic analysis. First, let’s explore what this means. A corpus is a large collection of language – often billions of words – which is organised in a systematic way and stored digitally. It can be written language – often scraped from internet sites – or spoken language which has been transcribed. Researchers of language who use a corpus are known as corpus linguists and they use a corpus to explore how language works in context. For Chris, corpus linguistics is an important tool for analysing the language used in creating a verbal identity for a brand. Activity 3 Corpus tools Allow about 15 minutes Now listen to the rest of the audio interview with Chris West. CHRIS WEST We use a variety of linguistic tools in our process, and I think this makes us different to what a lot of creative agencies are doing. So, in the 20 years I worked in advertising, there would come a point where I had to stand up in front of the CEO and say ‘This is one of the words we want to use about your brand’, or ‘This is the end line that we want to use about your brand’, and the CEO would say ‘Chris, why’s that?’ And I’d have to shrug my shoulders and say ‘I’m the writer, that’s what I think.’ And we were in a situation a couple of years ago where we … I had to stand up in front of the CEO of a multinational hotel chain. And he’d asked us, specifically, ‘What are the three words that we should use internally to describe our brand?’ And we presented a word, and he said ‘No, that’s not it!’ And we said ‘That’s okay, we have this other idea for a word.’ And he said ‘Hey, that’s interesting. Why that word?’ And because we knew about corpus linguistics, we were able to say ‘Well one of our great linguists has gone off and looked at four-and-a-half billion words in American English and seen how this word is used. And it’s most commonly used in this context. And, so, whilst there may be 12 different opinions about this word in the room with you now sir, this is how the outside world thinks of this word. And when you say this word this is how they’re used to hearing it.’ But I’ll give you an example of how we’ve used corpus linguistics recently. We were recently using text analytic software with a supermarket. And one of the themes that emerged was people’s discontent with the manager. And the typical expression would be something like ‘The manager was incompetent.’ So we asked our skilled linguists to help us understand what was in the meaning of the word ‘manager’. And, in fact, we found there are two meanings of ‘manager’. One is ‘the manager’ is almost the brand’s representative on Earth. He or she is the person who’s put there to make sure everything works properly, and to make sure all the wrinkles are smoothed out. Now, there’s another use of the word ‘manager’ – which we all experience – which is pretty much everyone in an office these days is called a manager. And it’s become a professionally hollow term. So when I want to find the German bread on the shelf at the supermarket – which was there last week, I’m pretty sure it was – I speak to someone, and he says ‘I’m the manager, how can I help?’ And I think ‘Well, this is great. Here’s the guy that’s the brand’s representative on Earth, and he’s going to help me.’ And he doesn’t know where the German bread is. So, suddenly, I think ‘Well, hold on, he’s the guy – or she’s the guy – and they’re incompetent.’ And then my brain switches in to the other meaning of ‘manager’, which is ‘They’re not the manager. They don’t have a manager round here; everyone’s a manager. No one does anything.’ And, of course, in Britain there’s a third use of ‘the manager’, common, in everyday language, which is the ‘football manager’. And what happens to a football manager if he loses three games on the trot? He’s fired. So this manager that can’t find my German bread, my lactose-free milk, or my chocolate-covered rice cakes, he should be fired! So what we were finding by using corpus linguistics was not just what people thought, but what people really meant and what was a deep-seated belief about this person that was being presented as a manager. There’s another example of how we use the skills of linguistics to help our clients understand. We were asked by the manufacturer of an engine-oil lubricant to help them. Their situation was, for about 20 years, they’d been using one word in all of their marketing communications. And that word was ‘performance’. So we asked our linguistic analysis team to conduct a corpus linguistic study on what ‘performance’ meant. And they came back with some interesting results. They said, first of all, there are slightly different meanings between British English and American English. In American English ‘performance’ means mechanical performance. So that’s good; that suits the manufacturer of an engine-oil lubricant. In British English, ‘performance’ has another connotation, which is human performance. ‘The actor gave a good performance’, or ‘The MP’ or ‘The PM’ … ‘The prime minister was credible, they gave a good performance.’ So that works for the engine-oil manufacturer in Britain as well, because, by luck or by design, they had always included the guys from the lab in the white coat in their communications. So there was this understanding of human performance influencing the product. But there’s another connotation now, developing about the word performance. Corpus linguistics shows that the way performance is used more and more these days, particularly over the last five years – around about the time the word performance stopped performing for our client – is in ‘performance management’. This is a term that HR departments use. And, really, they use it in a way to say ‘This is a standard up to which you can never quite get yourself.’ Or, actually, you’re on ‘performance management’, or ‘performance measurement’, shortly before you’re fired. So whilst the engine-oil manufacturer was talking about the performance of this engine oil, and the people that do it and what it does in the machine – and they expected that to work – as soon as they said ‘performance’, someone was sitting at home going ‘Oh no, “performance management”! Oh no! That’s the stuff that happens when I get fired.’ So corpus linguistics had helped the client understand why a word that they’d been using for 20 years wasn’t suitable anymore because the meaning of the word had moved on. In what way does Chris make use of corpus tools? How does this help in his conversations with his clients? Chris uses corpora (more than one ‘corpus’) – and the services of trained linguists who interpret the output of corpus software – to investigate the associations and connotations of individual words (what contexts they occur in and what other words are used with them). He also uses corpus analysis to investigate differences in the usage of words in American and British English (broadly speaking) and to investigate how word use might be changing over time. This helps him to make decisions about which words are more or less appropriate for a particular brand at a particular point, and it also helps him to explain certain attitudes that might be conveyed with words or expressions. In the case of ‘manager’, for instance, he was able to explain why customers generally do not have high expectations of someone with this job title. Chris summarised how the results of a corpus linguistic analysis are helpful to him: It is interesting how it works: the presence of an independent voice [of the corpus analysis and its interpretation] gives weight to the shared intuitions, and also magnifies important meanings that we might have rushed over. The fact that manager is now such a cliché to the point of becoming vacuous, for example, was perfect in illuminating some of the reasons why people want to speak to a manager but expect him to be ineffective. (2013, personal communication) Bearing all of this in mind, the course will now focus on a company that Chris singles out as particularly good at verbal identity: Innocent Drinks.

Four different kinds of packaging are shown for Innocent Drinks’ ‘strawberries and bananas’ Smoothie. On the left are two small bottles, one slightly smaller than the other and labelled ‘tasty new size’ with an arrow, as if handwritten. On the right are two larger cartons, one with the inscription ‘2 of your 5-a-day’, echoing a UK government slogan encouraging healthy eating, and one described as ‘value pack’. Although there is some selective use of turquoise blue, the dominant colour of all four containers is strawberry red on a white background, with the characteristic Innocent logo of a fruit with pseudo-eyes and a halo. The words ‘innocent pure fruit smoothie’ are written in pale grey on all four packages.

Innocent Drinks (‘Innocent’) is a company headquartered in the UK that started out in 1999 making smoothies (thick, pulpy fruit juices) and now also makes juice, noodle pots, vegetable pots, and children’s versions of its drinks. The products are sold internationally in many food outlets, including supermarkets, coffee shops and newsagents. Originally founded by a group of three friends, the company is now mostly owned by The Coca-Cola Company. Activity 4 Formal and informal language Allow about 15 minutes Before you look in detail at Innocent’s verbal identity, take a look at the features of language below (based on Biber, 1988). Sort them into features that in English can be associated with formal language, of the kind you might use, for example, in writing reports or in academic essays, and informal language, of the kind you would use for example when talking to close friends. Looking at the list of informal features, can you think of a particular type of language/discourse that these might be very common in? These informal features tend to be associated with spoken language (Biber, 1988). When we speak, especially when we speak to each other, we tend to speak in short sentences that may seem incomplete if compared to written phrasing. We use lots of fillers, imprecise words, contractions and incomplete sentences, and address each other directly with ‘you’. Of course, there is a lot of variation in speaking styles, and there is no strict one-to-one correspondence. Especially considering other languages and cultures, such lists can include different components. For example, in many languages (including French, German, Hungarian and Farsi) in/formality is also represented in the choice of informal or formal second person pronoun/ term of address – the so-called tu/vous distinction.

One of the things that Innocent Drinks is well-known for in the UK – and this links with the company’s verbal identity – is the text it puts on its packaging. Instead of simple declarations like ‘Not made from concentrates. No preservatives’, which are common nowadays on food and drinks packaging, Innocent includes texts such as: An innocent promise We promise that anything innocent will always taste good and do you good. We promise that we’ll never use concentrates, preservatives, stabilisers, or any weird stuff in our drinks. And we promise to always wipe our feet. Perhaps you can already see why Chris suggested that Innocent does verbal identity really well. Even in this short extract you can see how the brand ‘sounds’ very different from many others with a similar product range. The main speech act – what is being done with words – for example is that of promises rather than simple statements. The tone is friendly and informal, addressing (a potentially large group of) consumers as if it was an individual through the ambiguous use of you. And there is a quirky humour in the last sentence which implicitly suggests that Innocent are like (well-behaved) children. While Innocent Drinks were an early adopter of a conversational tone, many other companies now use similar language. Examples include Aussie shampoo and conditioner (‘Aussie hair with more bounce than a joey?’) and Duolingo language learning app (‘Nagging isn’t my style but giving up on French now would not be cool’). Look out for similarly conversational language on products and services you regularly use. Do you find this engaging – or is it now so widespread it can be a little irritating?! Activity 5 The Innocent Smoothie carton Allow about 15 minutes Now take a look at the text on the back of an Innocent Smoothie carton, shown below. Can you identify examples of informal linguistic features? Is there anything else about the language that stands out to you? Think about what you normally find on the back of drinks cartons.

The title reads ‘so darned healthy’. The text reads: ‘Detoxing is pretty simple. First of all, cut out the bad stuff. Check all pockets for any stray cream buns. Then start adding super-nutritious stuff to your diet. Like this new detox recipe. We reckon it’s the healthiest thing we’ve ever put in a carton: Acai – the Brazilian super-berry that contains Omega 6 and 9, is high in antioxidants that protect cells from the damage caused by free-radicals and will even clean your car*; Blueberries – our favourite antioxidant-rich superfood; Pomegranates – rich in antioxidants, which are the particular antioxidants that make all three of these fruits so healthy. So there you have it. Three superfoods, one carton, in your fridge. You lucky thing.’ Below the text is a small drawing of a red car, made to look freshly cleaned with rays of light emitting in all directions. Below the car is the text ‘* not really’.

There are plenty of examples of informal language on the back of this carton: the absence of a capital letter in the first line, single-clause sentences, vague words like stuff, reckon, thing, discourse markers, contractions and direct address (in the form of commands and the use of ‘you’). Additionally, an element of humour is present at the end of the section on Acai and marked by the use of the asterisk and footnote ‘not really’. It’s a strange kind of absurdist humour that is similar to the example before. What also stands out in this example is the use of technical terminology like free-radicals, antioxidants, anthocyanins and maybe even Omega 6. These technical words are more typical of the health and pharmaceutical industries and might appear to be at odds with the rest of the tone. However, you could argue that they are in fact consistent with the health aspect of the brand that is being emphasised.

Innocent is particularly good at keeping the personality created by the language consistent and coherent across all platforms and points of sale (points of contact with customers). The type of humour discussed in the previous two examples is just one manifestation of that. Activity 6 The Innocent website Allow about 15 minutes Look at the Innocent Drinks website and take a few minutes to think about how the brand is displayed. Chris mentioned the brand speaking in a slightly cheeky way. Can you find linguistic evidence of that in the image? What grammatical features could indicate ‘cheekiness’? Does it connect with what you noticed on the drinks carton? Websites change of course, and the notes here are based on the homepage at the time of writing (February 2026). It’s difficult to say what language might be characteristic of cheekiness, but it definitely relates to informality and the type of humour already discussed. Notice the lowercase headings, and colloquial/imprecise expressions – for example, at the time of writing, these included ‘plot twist’, ‘things we make’, ‘the Big Knit’, and ‘fruit & veg forever’. These are all markers of informality and mimic how people speak in everyday contexts. Speech is also imitated in the direct address of the audience (‘hello, we’re innocent’), and invitations to do things (commands like ‘give us a follow’, ‘get in touch’). Notice also the humour in the image of a microphone next to the words ‘something to say?’ and the rocket at the bottom of the homepage with the words ‘back to the top’. Once again, there is a slight element of the absurd with associations of childhood, as on the packaging. You’ll no doubt have noticed similar features on the website, whenever you view this, and they all tie in with what is on the drinks cartons.

The brand name and logo are, of course, also key aspects of the verbal identity (and, in the colour and font of the brand name, you can see how verbal and visual identity overlap). The name and logo both carry this slightly cheeky tone, channelling playfulness and informality by evoking associations with children and childhood. ‘Innocent’ as a word tends to be used to describe children – you can check this in a corpus – while the logo itself looks like something produced by a child and has connotations of being unadulterated. The logo additionally reinforces the sense of fun as it uses a mock halo above a very schematic representation of a face. In addition, the health aspect of the products is emphasised once again in the central image. Activity 7 Verbal identity globally? Allow about 10 minutes One final point to reflect on: Innocent Drinks has come a long way since its founding. It’s now owned by The Coca-Cola Company and is sold internationally. Can you think of any challenges that this growth trajectory might pose for the company’s verbal identity? There are probably many challenges that the company faces as it grows, but one aspect will be the differences between languages and cultures. The features discussed in the earlier activity as examples of informality, are examples in English, perhaps even only in a particular regional variety of English. Similarly, the associations of individual words will vary from country to country and region to region. Grammar and corpus linguistics can, of course, be of use in meeting these challenges. You can explore, for example, whether the word ‘innocent’ has the same associations in American as in British English. You can also explore corpora of spoken language in other languages to discern what grammatical features are associated with it and adapt the texts accordingly.

In this week you’ve seen how an implicit awareness of language underlies the design of everyday product packaging and company communications, and how corpus linguistics can be used to provide the solid linguistic evidence to underpin commercial decisions. If you’re interested in reading more about how brands establish their verbal – and visual – brand identity, you could look at other companies which specialise in this (or search online for ‘branding identity’). Examples might include the following: The Way With Words Category of One Branding 20 brand identity examples and ideas to inspire you In Week 2, you’ll look at English for Academic Purposes – or EAP – and the role corpus linguistics can play. You can now go to Week 2. Week 2: Exploring corpus linguistics in EAP

A word cloud featuring words such as corpora, English, teaching, corpus, linguistics, teach, academic.

You’ve probably seen word clouds like the one above before. They’re often used in newspapers and in social media as illustrations. This one was generated using a free word cloud generator (Generate Word Cloud) by inputting some of the most important content words from this week’s study. Take a moment to pause and consider what you expect this week to cover, based on its title, and the word cloud (note that words with a larger font are those which appear more frequently). From this week’s title, you know this is about corpus linguistics – or the study of language using a large collection of texts (a corpus) organised in a systematic way and stored digitally (you first encountered the term ‘corpus’ in Week 1). You may or may not be familiar with the term EAP in the title, but from the word cloud you may have worked out that this stands for English for Academic Purposes. Other words such as ‘teaching’ and ‘students’ and ‘class’ might seem an obvious fit here, but you may be wondering why ‘pronouns’ features. This will become clear as the week progresses. This week you’ll explore how language analysis can be taught in a classroom using corpus linguistics as a tool. First you’ll watch a short video in which a teacher of EAP uses corpora (more than one corpus) based on the students’ academic discipline areas to engage them in exploring language. You’ll hear views from individual students in the class, and you’ll listen to an interview with the teacher – Dr Maggie Charles – in which she reflects on aspects of the class and also explains how her use of corpus linguistics supports her teaching. By the end of this week, you should be able to: understand more around the role of an EAP teacher see how language analysis can be helped by corpus linguistics understand how pronouns are used in essays. First, you’ll look at what the term ‘EAP’ covers alongside some of the other, similar terms in use today. English for academic purposes, or EAP for short, is a large and growing area within the profession of English language teaching. Most universities in English-medium contexts such as the UK, USA, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and South Africa, as well as many other higher education contexts around the world with English as a medium of instruction (often termed EMI), have specialist EAP teachers. In many EAP classes, the majority of students have English as their second, third, or later language (usually referred to as English as an additional language, or EAL). But monolingual or first language English students may also attend, since ‘academic English’ is very different to the language used in everyday life (and in that sense, no one is a ‘native speaker’). Note that the term ‘EAP’ covers the reading of academic texts as well as writing, and also oral skills such as joining in seminar discussions. EAP can involve students at a range of levels, but is most often used for university level – it could cover foundation courses, undergraduate teaching and postgraduate study. The students you’ll see in the videos here are all postgraduate students. Their English levels are quite high, but they want to learn language useful for their particular discipline. One way to find out how language is used in a particular subject area is to use a corpus, as you’ll see next. In this section, you’ll watch a video of Maggie Charles teaching a group of postgraduate students. The students are sitting at long desks and each student uses a computer built into the desk. Maggie sits at the front of the class and can project her computer screen onto a larger screen.

A photograph of a classroom.

Maggie’s class uses a corpus of Social Science texts for her postgraduate students to explore together. This corpus was put together by Maggie and contains student theses – or dissertations - from Politics and International Relations. It’s quite specialised, but this means it’s useful for finding out how language is used in a particular area. Across the term, the students in Maggie’s class learn how to build their own corpus of texts from their own particular discipline. In this class, Maggie uses a computer program called AntConc (Anthony, 2022) to help students explore the language used in a corpus of written academic texts. AntConc is free software - if you’re interested in trying it out you can download it for free from Laurence Anthony’s website. There are helpful video tutorials on this website too.

Figure 1 A screenshot of AntConc software in use A screenshot of AntConc software in use

Figure 1 shows concordance lines in AntConc. A concordance line displays a word in context (i.e. with the words it appears with before and afterwards); it’s a way of looking at a lot of words at once and sorting for patterns. The software allows the linguist to sort to the left or right of the search term and see what words often appear with the word. In Figure 1, the filename appears on the left, followed by items to the left of the search term process, then items to the right. Note that concordance lines are read from top to bottom, rather than from left to right. In this example, the concordance lines are sorted to the right, and show examples of process followed by of. In the class, Maggie and her students investigate the use of the first-person pronouns ‘I’ and ‘we’. These pronouns (like the related forms ‘me’, ‘myself’, ‘us’, ‘ourselves’, etc.) are forms of self-reference – that is, ways in which you can refer to yourself. Activity 1 Using first-person pronouns Allow about 15 minutes Look at the text below, which is taken from Maggie’s PowerPoint presentation to the class, and note your initial thoughts on the bulleted questions. Frequent student questions Can I use ‘I’ in my thesis? In my language we don’t use ‘I’ and ‘we’ in academic writing. Is it the same in English? Is it OK to say ‘we’ when I am the only writer? When can I use ‘I’ and ‘we’ and when should I avoid them? Can I use both ‘I’ and ‘we’ in the same piece of writing? These are all questions about self-reference. The text in Maggie’s next slide addresses some of the points raised above. Self-reference in academic writing Writers can refer to themselves using first person forms (I, me, my, we, us, our). These forms allow the writer to take a clear position in the text. They express the writer’s identity. They establish the writer’s commitment to their work. They set up a relationship with the reader. BUT There are differences between disciplines in the use of self-reference. It is not easy to know when these forms are appropriate. SO Knowing when to use self-reference can be problematic. Maggie’s class contains students with different first languages and from several different countries, so it’s impossible to cover all the variation in the use of self-reference. By drawing on a corpus to investigate language use, students can find out for themselves what the usual practice is in Anglophone academic writing in their own discipline. The answer to some questions depends on the discipline of the academic writing. For example, look at the two ways of recounting one small step in an Engineering laboratory report and think about which is more usual: ‘the perimeter was measured’ ‘I measured the perimeter’ In an Engineering laboratory report, it’s more common to use a) than b). Example a) uses the passive voice (‘was measured’ – we don’t know who took the measurement) and example b) uses the active voice (the ‘I’ narrator took the measurement). Here, it isn’t important to know who did the measuring. Now watch a video of Maggie’s class, intercut with Maggie explaining how she teaches using corpora. Activity 2 Using corpora in the EAP classroom Allow about 15 minutes MAGGIE CHARLES I think the first thing to say is that perhaps the most important feature of anybody accessing the corpus for the first time is that it will always show you something surprising. So I say to the students right from the very beginning, you are going to be surprised, and I am also constantly surprised by what the corpora throw up. So you have to expect the unexpected. Shout out if you get something different. If you’re not in agreement. Chaltis? CHALTIS In natural sentences we usually use ‘we’ because you need to give a bit of a certain authority that agree with the result that you present. And it’s not your decision to just show it or something. MAGGIE CHARLES OK. Absolutely. In essence, academic writing, you don’t want to be alone. OK? Being alone is really not a good place to be. And so you recruit this shadowy army, if you like, of people who are willing to go along with your argument with whatever you are doing. So I think when you’re teaching students with English as an additional language, then one of the issues that they have is to express themselves in a way that is normal or conventional or acceptable within their own academic context. Advanced students have problems to actually make their writing sound natural. And what the corpus then does for them is to give them a lot of examples which enable them to see that there are repeated patterns in language which they can then learn and transfer to their own writing. So I think that that’s particularly valuable for English as additional language. Although I would also say it wouldn’t really matter whether it was French or German; access to a corpus is something that I think all language learners should be made aware of.

As you watch the video, answer the questions below. What does Maggie say first about using corpora? How does using a corpus help students with English as an additional language? The most important feature Maggie discusses is that a corpus will always show you something surprising. She says she is ‘constantly surprised by what the corpora throw up. So you have to expect the unexpected’. EAL students – as well as other students – have to learn how to express themselves in ways that are acceptable in their academic context and that sound natural. The corpus provides patterns and these help both EAL and other students. In the next video clip, you’ll hear the views of three of Maggie’s students: Verena, a German speaker who is studying Economics Gabriele, who speaks both Italian and Portuguese as first languages and is a philosopher Li-Chia, whose first language is Mandarin Chinese and who is studying Archaeology. Activity 3 Listening to three students’ views Allow about 15 minutes VERENA DILL At the moment, I’m using corpora to analyse self-references. So, how to use them. For example, I use the word ‘we’ and looked at the hits. In my corpora, in my field, I have more than 2,000 hits, so it’s a word that is frequently used. And I now look at the combinations. So, what the authors do. So, do they use ‘we’ in terms of showing results, or talking about what procedures they use? Something like this. This is what I’m doing at the moment. MAGGIE CHARLES I would be a millionaire if I had a pound for every student who has asked me ‘Can I use “I” in my thesis?’ Quite a lot of you are using it less frequently than the experts. And more frequently than the experts? OK, right. English tends to be a language which certainly allows – and certainly for certain disciplines – the use of ‘I’ and ‘we’. And that may be very much something which is not allowed by the native languages of some of these students. So they will find it really very, very strange when they encounter it in reading research articles, for example. VERENA DILL My native language is German. So, in German, in scientific texts or at school, we learned not to use any self-references. So, for me, as a German native speaker, it’s kind of unusual to use this kind of self-reference. So for me, corpora is essentially giving me kind of a feeling how native speakers in English would use self-references. GABRIELE CORNELLI The fact is, we should need to understand how people – scholars in our field – they write in a good English way. And so this software and this management of the corpus of writing, is a good tool for us to have a quick and very effective search. I am an Italian and Portuguese speaker. And so when I try to write and speak – especially writing in English – I have to realise at the time that I think that I am writing in English, and sometimes I’m just translating from my own language. MAGGIE CHARLES What we’re trying to do is to show how some of the most frequent collocations can be linked to certain functions of discourse. So, for example, we look at – as we did today, we were looking at self-reference, and we were thinking not just about whether ‘we’ and ‘I’ were used, but actually the functions that they were carrying out within the texts and within the corpora. LI-CHIA LIU I find it quite useful, because my English writing ability is poor. And I now quite understand what specific terms and using which appear quite frequently in the successful essays written by very acclaimed researchers. So I can imitate their writing.

As you listen, make notes on what each student says about the value in using a corpus. Why does Maggie think it’s difficult for EAL students to use first person pronouns in their writing? The three students are all positive about using corpora to investigate academic writing in their subject areas. Verena is currently using her corpus of Economics articles to search for instances – or ‘hits’ - of the first person plural ‘we’. She shows us the different ways in which writers combine ‘we’ with other words in her English corpus and comments that in German it is unusual to use ‘I’ or ‘we’ in scientific writing. Gabriele describes corpus software as a good tool. He says he realises that he often translates from Italian or Portuguese into English, rather than writing directly into English. Finally, Li-Chia says she finds it useful to explore the writing of successful academics in order to learn from them. Maggie points out that English is a language that allows ‘I’ and ‘we’ in some disciplines whereas some students’ first languages may not allow this. The corpora may thus throw up surprising patterns for students. In the final video extract, Maggie gives her views on the benefits of using corpora. She uses the term collocation, which refers to the tendency of words to occur with particular other words more than would be expected by chance. For example, make collocates with a + mistake and raining collocates with heavily.) Activity 4 Maggie Charles’s views on the benefits of corpora Allow about 15 minutes MAGGIE CHARLES What I want the students to get out of it is ways in which they can, for example, use ‘I’ and ‘we’ that will be functional and acceptable within their own discipline. I think the other really big issue is an issue of the student’s identity and self-confidence. And one of the things that, of course, the programme does is it socialises the student into a disciplinary research-community, so that they start to think in the way that the disciplinary community thinks. And they need, also at that stage, to be able to take on the writing conventions of that disciplinary community in order to be accepted by it. [Talking in class] What I want us to do, then, is to move on. And we’re going to do two things. First of all, I’m going to show you a tool which is going to help you pick out short phrases from corpora. And we’re going to have a look at that in relation to the social science corpus and see what sort of functions come out of that. And then you’re going to move on and have a look at – using this tool – have a look at what happens in your own corpus. One of the most important things is that the students get repeated exposure to a lot of examples. So, for example, if you present a new word or a new grammatical pattern or a new collocation in a text, the students will probably only see it once. But if they can see that in a corpus, then they are able to see lots of examples of the same sort of ... whether it’s a phrase or a collocation or a word. OK, so that’s the repeated exposure which I think helps learning. Another of the really important things is that it focuses students’ attention on the context of the word. So, instead of just looking at a verb out of context, you’ve got the verb as it appears in a wider context. What the students can do, of course, is to expand that context so that they can see not just the word, not even just the concordance line, but actually go right back into the original text and see the whole paragraph, or as much of the text as they want. A third thing is that when you’re looking at concordance lines, they highlight, very clearly indeed, the way that language is a patterned phenomenon. MAGGIE CHARLES [Talking in class] More frequently than the experts? [INTERPOSING VOICES] MAGGIE CHARLES Interestingly, it seems to be an individual trait of this particular writer.

List the three benefits of using corpora that Maggie mentions. Maggie says that it’s important for students to have ‘repeated exposure to a lot of examples’ as a key feature of corpora. In a text, students might only see one example; whereas, in a corpus they would see lots of examples of a phrase or collocation. Using a corpus focuses attention on the context of a word. It’s possible to see words in the context of concordance lines, whole paragraphs or even the whole text. Maggie points out that concordance lines highlight how language is a ‘patterned phenomenon’. The corpus user can look at all the words appearing to the left or right of a particular search word and see what words commonly come before or after the search word. Next, listen to an audio interview conducted with Maggie after the lesson that you have just seen. First of all, Maggie was asked how she felt the lesson had gone and whether it was a typical class. Activity 5 Interview with Maggie Charles Allow about 40 minutes Make brief notes on what you think might go wrong in carrying out corpus searches if you haven’t used one before. Then listen to Maggie’s response. PRESENTER First, Maggie gives her view on how her lesson went. MAGGIE CHARLES I think it went reasonably well. It’s true that whenever you’re using any sort of technical aids, there can be technical problems, so we were quite lucky. None of the students forgot their passwords, they could all log on, they could all actually start to use the software. And I think most of the students in that class were actually not having any problems with their corpora. So they’ve built the corpora ... This is their second week of building it. So the corpora aren’t very big, but, nonetheless, everybody managed to find plenty of instances of the search term. Maggie felt the class had gone ‘reasonably well’. There were no problems in this class, but she mentioned some potential issues. These included technical issues such as students forgetting their passwords and pedagogical issues such as students not finding many instances of the search term. Next, Maggie was asked whether she ever found that students didn’t see the purpose in using corpora and corpus software. Again, think about the kind of thing students might say, then listen to Maggie’s response. MAGGIE CHARLES When I first started using this software, I did find that … one student memorably said to me ‘Why are we doing this? It’s just a technique,’ and I explained why, obviously, and that I thought, well, yes, it was a technique, but it was a very well-worthwhile technique for students to learn, to help in their language learning. I can remember just one specific student who voiced this objection. She said she thought it was a useful technique, but that wasn’t what she wanted to be doing in a language class. And when I asked her what she did want to be doing in a language class, then the answer was she wanted to be doing a lot more discussion. So she didn’t want to be sitting and working on her own computer. She said ‘I can do that at home.’ And she wanted to be talking. And that’s also quite interesting, because I remember in the early classes I found it very, very difficult to actually stop the students from just working on their own computers and to get them to discuss what they had found. Maggie described one student who said she’d rather have discussion in a language class than corpus activities. However, Maggie comments in the interview that early on in her corpus classes she found it very difficult to stop students from working alone on their computers and had to persuade them to discuss their findings with other students! Finally, Maggie was asked what she hoped students in her classes would learn about academic writing. She begins by discussing ‘general’ academic writing and the usefulness of getting students to explore their own field (or discipline), and then talks about the usefulness of corpora. As you listen, write notes on the different points she makes on the value of using corpora to explore academic writing. MAGGIE CHARLES It’s very often held that there’s no such thing as general academic writing; you can’t teach general academic writing. Whereas my view is that, in reality, that’s what a lot of people have to teach, so we better find some ways of doing it. And, in my view, one of the ways of doing it is to use that disciplinary variety in a very creative way, by getting students to explain what’s happening in their own field to someone who is in a different field. It even works well ... In the second class, we had two people working together who were working in the same field, but even that works well because they found, for example, that they had estimated the frequency of ‘we’ as different. So, then, they checked it against their own corpus data, and I think they found that one of them made a better estimate than the other. I suppose what I want them to do is that I want them to go away knowing something and able to do something which they either didn’t know before, thought they knew and have now discovered is not quite the case, and they need a take-home message which is quite clear and which is relevant to them and their thesis and their writing. They appreciate a corpus because it gives them this access to multiple, multiple examples. One student from a few years ago puts every research article she reads straight into the corpus. So the last time I checked with her, she had over 400 articles in it – this is going to be quite a big corpus. And she said to me, when I asked her why, she said to me, ‘I’m more confident if I see 2000 hits than 20 hits.’ From the end of this course, they go away with their own corpus. One of my major themes in getting them to build their own corpus is that they should be more autonomous; that they can be more independent learners. What we want to do is, essentially, make ourselves redundant. By the time they have done a year with me, or even if they’ve only done one term with me, if it’s this term, they will go away with something that is theirs – they can adapt it, they can grow it, they can use it whenever they want to, but they have the basis of the tool and the knowledge. And I think that really aids independent learning. Certainly, a lot of the students that I get, I don’t think have ever thought of language as an object of study, and especially not as an object of study which can be carried out by computers. Okay. So, that, they tend to think of language as something that ‘Oh gosh, you’ve just got to go and learn it.’ Okay. Well, actually, you can take some shortcuts to discover what it would make sense to learn and the computer can help you do that. So, that, one of the things that is particularly relevant for our students is that looking at the scrutinising of evidence – this, first of all, collection of evidence, which is your data, which is your corpus – then scrutinising it, analysing it, and drawing conclusions from it is exactly what we expect them to do, certainly when they are doing a research degree and probably also at third-year undergraduate level. You may have noted the following points from Maggie’s response. Using corpora and discussing findings with others helps students to understand disciplinary variation. Students learn something new about particular linguistic areas from their corpus investigations. Students ‘appreciate a corpus’ because they have access to lots of examples of language. Individuals leave the course with their own corpus, which they can use and add to. This helps them to be more independent learners. Students learn to think of language as an object of study. They learn that a corpus and computer software can help them to analyse linguistic evidence and to understand language. In her interview, Maggie Charles described how she encourages each of her students to build their own small corpus of texts within their discipline area so that they can explore how language is used. This enables students to be researchers and investigate language in use for themselves. In this section you will hopefully see how building a corpus isn’t as difficult or scary as it might sound. In fact, it’s possible to put together your own small corpus in under an hour. The hard part is deciding what you want to find out, and therefore what kinds of texts to use and what searches to carry out. The following activity shows you how to build a corpus of your own texts. Activity 6 A corpus of your own writing Allow about 1 hour 30 minutes This activity shows how you can compile a corpus of your own texts. These could be essays if you are a student, but you could of course choose to build a corpus of your letters, emails, blogposts or any other form of writing you have available in electronic form. Using your own texts means you don’t need to worry about copyright permission. As a guide, begin with five or six texts of at least 100 words each, though note that it isn’t any harder to build the corpus if the texts are longer. Here’s a step-by-step guide to creating and searching your own corpus: First you need to open each text and save it as a ‘plain text’ file. This is simply a form that corpus software can read. To do this on a PC using MS Word, click ‘File’, ‘Save as’ and in the drop-down list next to ‘save as type’ choose the option ‘plain text’ or ‘text’ (it’ll end in the extension *.txt). Save all the plain text documents in one folder and label this ‘my corpus’ (or something meaningful to you). Make sure you know how to navigate to the folder. You have now successfully built a corpus. You need to have software to search your corpus. You could use AntConc for this as it’s free and there are lots of helpful guidance on Lawrence Anthony’s website. You could use your corpus to find out what words and phrases you often use. If you’d like to go further in using your corpus, you could follow up with some of the resources in the ‘Further exploration’ section. If you’d like to explore EAP as a profession further, you could start with the British Council site: Teaching English for Academic Purposes (EAP). Another useful source of information is the following website for EAP teachers: The global forum for EAP professionals. You can explore corpus linguistics through the following free course: Corpus Linguistics Analysis. The NCRM (National Council for Research Methods) has useful material, for example, the following resource: Maria Leedham (2025) Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies, National Centre for Research Methods online learning resource. If you’re interested in finding out more about Maggie Charles’s use of corpora in EAP, read her paper: Maggie Charles (2014) ‘Getting the corpus habit: EAP students’ long-term use of personal corpora’, English for Specific Purposes, vol. 35, pp. 35–40. This article is short and very readable. It includes interesting quotes on the pros and cons of students using their own corpora from a cohort of students one year on from their course with Maggie Charles. In this week of the course you’ve explored how corpus searches can be used in an EAP classroom and you’ve heard the views of several students and a teacher. You’ve also seen how you could fairly easily build your own corpus and explore your own writing. You should now feel you have some insight into how and why corpora can be used to explore EAP or other texts and explore language patterns. Next week you’ll explore how language analysis can help in changing the culture of an organisation. You can now go to Week 3. Week 3: Exploring language in organisational culture change

A photograph of a group of colleagues in a work environment.

Why don’t customers behave in the way organisations want them to? Why does a company have more male than female customers? How could companies improve their relationships with stakeholders? Why might an organisation find it difficult to change its culture? Whatever your current work, study or personal situation, it’s likely you’ve had some experience of being a member of an organisation. And, particularly if you’ve been a member of a large organisation, you may have come across the idea of changing the culture – or unvoiced attitudes and behaviours – within the organisation. But what might this entail? And how could exploring language help in changing organisational culture? In Week 1 you saw how grammar can be applied in company and product branding. Here in Week 3 you’ll look at how language analysis can be applied in another commercial context. This time the focus is on the role of language and linguistic analysis in understanding and changing organisational culture (defined here as the implicit attitudes and behaviours within large organisations). By the end of this week, you should be able to: understand how language analysis can help in changing organisational culture see how conversation analysis can support the process of change understand some useful concepts in discourse analysis. The term ‘culture’ can be difficult to define. It’s a fundamental – but partly intangible – aspect of all social units from whole nations to local communities; and is part of commercial, voluntary or other organisations and even individual families. Even if you can’t define it, most people will have an intuitive understanding of what culture is and, sometimes, strong feelings about what it is not. Activity 1 Defining culture Allow about 5 minutes Consider your understanding of ‘culture’. What kinds of behaviours, ways of doing things and thinking might be parts of culture? And what do you think might be meant by ‘organisational culture’? Make notes in the box below. Culture can sometimes be defined as ‘how things are done around here’ (Mullins, 2005, p. 891). This is both vague and informative, and seems to be symbolic of culture itself: culture, after all, is somewhat vague and intangible. Aspects that are often included as a part of culture include language, religions and myths, rituals and behaviours such as typical greetings or how meals are served and eaten, as long as these are shared by a group of people. More technically, Edgar Schein, an influential organisational culture theorist, defines culture as: … a pattern of shared basic assumptions learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, which has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems. (Schein, 2010, p. 17) If you think of a business organisation as a group of people with some shared purposes, then Schein’s definition works well for our purposes here. Schein is widely regarded as a pioneer in the field of organisational culture and his work has informed much of organisational culture theory (see Tadesse Bogale and Debela, 2024, for an overview of literature in this field). Having looked at what organisational culture is, at this point it might be helpful to think about how and where we can see it. How can we pinpoint or identify the culture of a specific organisation? This is an important question if you want to introduce changes. Schein (2016) argues that organisational culture is embedded at three different levels, in: artifacts espoused beliefs and values basic underlying assumptions. Only the top level, artifacts is immediately observable. Artifacts comprise ‘visible and feelable phenomena’ (Schein, 2016) such as the physical environment, language, style as in clothing, stories told in and about the organisation, mission and vision statements, overt behaviour, and so on. The middle level, espoused beliefs and values, reflects the ideals, goals, values, aspirations and ideologies of the group: these may or may not be congruent with (i.e. in agreement with) the group’s actual behaviours. The lowest level, basic underlying assumptions, is almost impossible to detect as this comprises the unconscious, taken-for-granted beliefs and values which determine individuals’ behaviours, perceptions, thoughts and feelings. This can make changing an organisation’s culture quite difficult but, as you will see later on, this is precisely where language analysis can be incredibly helpful. The metaphor of the Lily Pond

A silhouette of a person holding a spade saying ‘This pond uses only the finest organic fertilizers!’ There are then three layers: Espoused values; Cultural artifacts; Tacit cultural assumptions.

Schein summarises their three-level model with a metaphorical lily pond, describing this as follows: We can summarize this three-level model with a metaphoric lily pond. The blossoms and the leaves on the surface of the pond are the ‘artifacts’ that we can see and evaluate. The farmer who has created the pond (the leadership) announces what he expected and hoped for in the way of leaves and blossoms and will provide publicly accepted beliefs and values to justify the outcome. The farmer may or may not be consciously aware that the outcome is really a result of how the seeds, the root system, the quality of the water in the pond, and the fertilizers he put in combined to create the blossoms and leaves. This lack of awareness of what actually produces the results may not matter if the announced beliefs and values are congruent with how the leaves and blossoms turned out. (Schein, 2016) Pause a moment to reflect on Schein’s model. Does this resonate with any organisation you’ve been a member of? Does the model help to shed light on what was going on in the organisation’s culture – at both overt and hidden levels? You may be interested in a relatively recent addition to the terminology in the field of organisational culture studies – that of ‘culture washing’. In the same way as the term ‘green washing’ refers to a misleading impression of an organisation or product being environmentally sound, culture washing refers to organisations which claim they have a healthy internal culture when the reality is otherwise. For example, a company claiming a healthy work life ethic for employees but where the reality is that workers feel they have to be seen to be at their desk until their manager leaves, whatever time this is, could be said to display culture washing. In linguistic terms, culture washing could be said to be in place if the organisation claims equal terms of address for all, but in fact managers are referred to by their title and family name and lower level employees by their given name only. (See this site to read more on culture washing in the world of work.) Next, you’ll look at a case study showing how language analysis can play a part in helping to influence an organisation’s culture. Linguistic Landscapes is a business consultancy, founded in 2002 by Gill Ereaut, which specialises in tricky organisational problems that seem resistant to improvement. It works with businesses of all sizes, government departments and charities. Gill absolutely believes in the power of language to address organisational issues, especially ones that have their root causes in organisational culture. Gill uses various types of linguistic techniques such as corpus analysis, discourse studies and conversation analysis (CA) to investigate different kinds of problems that organisations might face. You learned about corpus analysis in Week 2 when the focus was on English language teaching. Broadly speaking, discourse analysis refers to the exploration of how language (written, spoken or signed) is used within a social context. Conversation analysis (often abbreviated to ‘CA’) is a type of discourse analysis which analyses spoken interaction. For example, a researcher might draw on CA to look at how conversation is organised into turns, how people negotiate these turns, who decides on the conversation topics and how these are changed. Conversation analysts might map out the talk in terms of adjacency pairs – two pair parts such as question and answer, greeting and greeting, and complement and acceptance/refusal. Activity 2 Linking language and organisational culture Allow about 5 minutes Note down ways in which language and organisational culture, as discussed above, might be connected. Note down ways in which language people use might be related to assumptions, beliefs and values. Language is often considered a part of culture, but, as you may have already picked up from this course, language also reflects and creates culture. It reflects and helps shape those beliefs, values and assumptions that are otherwise invisible – Schein’s lowest level, basic underlying assumptions – though it is involved at the other levels too. Gill Ereaut elaborates on this idea in the interview you’ll listen to next. In the following interview, Gill Ereaut elaborates on the idea of language reflecting and creating culture. Activity 3 Interview with Gill Ereaut part 1 Allow about 20 minutes Listen to the first part of the interview. As you listen, pay attention to what Gill says about the following: what culture is the connection between culture and language how she sees discourse analysis in relation to her work. PRESENTER In this audio clip Gill Ereaut talks about how linguistic analysis can shed light on organisational issues and culture. GILL EREAUT We provide a form of organisational consulting and we are essentially interested in helping organisations that want to change and/or organisations that want to connect better with their audiences or customers. And we do that through using linguistics and discourse analysis to allow people in an organisation to be able to see more clearly the culture of the organisation. Culture is a really important factor in business success – culture being defined in all sorts of ways, but loosely as, you know, the way we do things around here. I would tend to talk of it in terms of unspoken assumptions and this is who we are, what we do, what matters to us, not spoken, crucial to business success, really hard to get a hold on. What it seems to me underpins almost everything is the notion that sitting kind of underneath are a whole set of assumptions, presuppositions, a kind of completely taken-for-granted, an unspoken world view; and if we’re looking at culture as the unspoken, by looking at linguistic data from the everyday life of the organisation, it allows us to say, from the way you talk around here, it looks like this is what you believe. And in the light of what you tell us you’re trying to do, strategically, we just invite you to look at those unspoken assumptions for their usefulness for what you’re trying to do. When people first join a new organisation, for the first few weeks and months they can hear the way it speaks, you know, and they’re kind of like ‘Oh God!’, you know, this weird, weird way. And it’s not just that the new place has new words for old things, it actually kind of structures the world differently. It will chop the world up into different categories and there are different implied connections between those categories, and so on. After a few months, people can’t hear the language anymore, because what you’re doing when you first join an organisation is rapidly trying to get up to speed with the culture. My first degree was in psychology, then spent many years working in commercial research – so, market research – and for both the commercial and for public sector organisations. But also I got increasingly interested in the way that my client organisations spoke. So I would sit in a briefing meeting with Unilever or American Express, or, you know, whoever it was, and I would sit there and think that’s a really interesting planet you live on guys. They would have this perfectly free-formed set of vocabulary and I didn’t have the words to talk about it then, but then constructed the world in a particular way. And they constructed their consumers and their behaviour in a particular way. And I knew, as a researcher, that when I went and spoke to their consumers, their planet – their world – would look very different. And then through a different route I ended up going back to university and doing masters and chose to do a course in CA. It was like a light bulb kind of going bang, you know this whole world of discourse analysis in its loosest form opened up and I realised this could be the set of tools that would allow me to think and help an organisation see what it was doing to itself with its own language. So I founded Linguistic Landscapes really on the kind of burning curiosity. And within a year or two, less really, it was clear that you can make a consulting business, because this gives clients a perspective on their problems they have not had before. Gill talks about culture as ‘the way we do things around here’; but also as ‘unspoken assumptions about who we are, what we do, what matters to us’; and ‘a world view’. This is very much in line with Schein’s three-level model above – mostly these fall into the middle and bottom levels. For Gill, language is essentially the only visible manifestation of unspoken assumptions. The assumptions are not explicitly stated, but the way the company constructs the world around it using language nevertheless reflects these underlying ideas. As a result, linguistic analysis (or, as Gill says, ‘discourse analysis in its loosest form’) represents a set of tools that can give businesses a perspective on their problems they have not had before. The idea that a company can construct the world around it through language relates to one of the fundamental assumptions of the linguistic theory Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL): language is made up of sets of viable options of meaning. Each choice ‘acquires its meanings against the background of other choices which could have been made’ and so reflects some underlying assumption, understanding or attitude. Activity 4 Entering a new workplace Allow about 10 minutes Can you remember a time when you entered a new workplace, institution or club and could ‘hear the way it talked’, as Gill puts it? What were some of the things that seemed strange to you? What might these things say about the organisation’s worldview? Here is an example answer: I once worked in a small company where the stated motto of work was ‘serious fun’. One of the fun things the company did was to give all the electronic equipment (computers, laptops, printers, servers, etc.) names of Wild West characters. There was Billy the Kid and Buffalo Bill, Annie and Tonto. This often led to some quite bizarre sentences being uttered, but actually made the atmosphere a lot more personal. The machines were metaphorically talked about as people with mood swings and attitudes: ‘Billy the Kid [a printer] doesn’t want to play today’; ‘Tonto [a computer] has gone on strike’. This suggested a worldview where all parts of the work environment were animated and therefore to be treated with a degree of respect and compassion. I initially found it difficult to join in, mostly because I didn’t know many Wild West characters, but in a tiny company it’s almost impossible to resist these things. It’s about being part of the group. In the second part of the interview, Gill talks a bit more about the idea of constructing relationships though language. In particular, she talks about how companies might see themselves in relation to their customers and vice versa. Within SFL, relationships between different participants are encoded by Michael Halliday – the founding father of SFL – in a system of transitivity (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004, 2014). Put simply, the system of transitivity relates to the idea of ‘who does what to whom’. Thus, people may be: agents (or in SFL terms, actors – doing/performing the process) or affected entities (in SFL terms, goals – being acted on). They can also be involved in different types of processes (kinds of doing or being): ones that overtly affect others or the environment (e.g. material processes such as run, eat, buy) ones that do not overtly affect others or the environment (e.g. mental processes such as think, reflect, consider). In addition, such relationships are also encoded in what van Leeuwen (2008) refers to as the system of social actors. This system is similar to transitivity in that it takes into consideration whether a participant is represented as agent or affected entity, but it also focuses on the various ways in which participants can be referred to. The more specifically that individual people are referred to (e.g. by name and professional title, versus by their sex or ethnicity) the more they will be perceived as important – for example as people with authority and responsibility. Activity 5 Interview with Gill Ereaut part 2 Allow about 20 minutes Listen to the second part of the interview with Gill. What does Gill mean when she says ‘the way an organisation talks on the inside … makes its way to the outside’? Why does Gill say that no one within the organisation can change the ‘toxic relationships’ that are constructed through language? Think back to the links between language and culture above. GILL EREAUT I am completely convinced, because I’ve seen it so often, that the way an organisation talks on the inside about its products, about its customers – about its citizens, if it’s a government organisation – absolutely makes its way to the outside. Whether it does so overtly by an organisation simply using internal jargon externally. That happens, but it’s less frequent now. Much more pernicious actually is the leakage out of a particular way of structuring talk, which holds within it a particular set of attitudes or relationships. So the core – almost like existential – questions of who we are, and what we do and what matters around here, who they are out there – whether they’re customers, citizens, patients, whatever – and the nature of the relationship between us. So we have sometimes found some quite surprisingly toxic relationships being subtly but persistently leaked to the outside world as an organisation. You would never let anything go out of the door that effectively said ‘Actually customers are a bit stupid’, but we have found that as an unspoken persistent assumption. I mean, interestingly, what sits at that level was always once sensible. It always once made sense. But times change, that doesn’t change, because nobody can see it going on, and so the organisation can get really out of sync with its market or its environment. In that particular case it was a financial services organisation; so they were providing pensions and life insurance and, you know, big serious stuff. And in the old days actually what people wanted from a financial services provider was expertise and authority. So, in a sense, 30, 40 years ago, if I couldn’t understand what my financial services provider was saying, then, actually, that’s probably OK, because it meant they were very clever and they knew what they were doing, and I didn’t have to worry about understanding it myself. And, so, organisationally, institutionally, it was adaptive to assume a position of superiority. The difficulty is that in today’s market we don’t operate like that anymore. People now expect and want to be more involved in decisions about their own affairs, and they expect and want big organisations to be speaking to them in a respectful way that they can understand. The answer to the question of how much technical detail we share with clients is a little bit complicated and it definitely falls into two parts. One is how much technical detail we talk about at the point where we are persuading them to buy the stuff from us, and so what we’re aiming to do at that point is to make it clear to clients that this is theoretically based – it’s based in something: we didn’t make it up and it’s based in some really well-grounded empirical work across a very wide range of academic subjects. And also just to get the idea, the core idea that language is not a transparent medium through which we talk about a fixed reality, but that language is constitutive of that reality. I mean, to be honest, it doesn’t actually take much technical persuasion: most people are quite interested. They get, intuitively, the idea that how we talk about things matters. The second context in which we need to think about how far we talk about the technical aspects of the work is one where sharing findings and presenting work to clients; and there it’s a question of judgement. So I suppose again it divides into two. One is how much we want to talk dirty and technical. And I will often just sprinkle in even just one or two technical terms into a presentation just to remind them that this came from somewhere. So I might talk about transitivity or I might talk about conversation analysis. I might talk about adjacency pairs or whatever it is – just a tiny little bit. And then the other thing we do, which can sometimes lead us into slightly more technical kind of conversations or illustration, is we illustrate the findings. It’s very powerful for an organisation for people to see their own language played back to them with a set of annotations around it that allow them to see it in a different way. At the start of this week, it was discussed how culture at the level of underlying assumptions is invisible and intangible. Gill then made the point that you can only really hear culture reflected in language when you first join an organisation – after that you absorb the culture and can’t hear it anymore. If you put these two ideas together, you can see why no one notices that perhaps the relationships constructed through language are detrimental to the organisation. The people who can hear the way an organisation speaks tend to be new and may not have the authority to question the language; the people who do have the authority are less likely to hear or notice the language – how something is said. The worldview constructed internally through language is so normal that people may not even realise when it makes its way into communications designed for customers. In the second part of the interview, Gill also talked about how some organisations, like financial service providers, were traditionally expected to construct themselves as authoritative and more powerful than their customers. The next activity explores this further. Activity 6 Constructing the organisation as authoritative Allow about 10 minutes Take a look at the following example sentences. In which sentences is the company presenting itself in a position of authority? How could you rephrase the text to suggest a more equal relationship? Our experts at Pension Quotes give detailed, personalised advice. We also help you understand how a state pension interacts with other pensions you may have. You choose where the money is invested and therefore the level of risk. You may have come up with different points, but you may have thought that these sentences are listed in decreasing degree of company authority. Looking at social actors (van Leeuwen, 2008), in the first sentence, the process of ‘giving’ is performed by a collective agent described as ‘experts’ working in a named company. In contrast, the audience or potential customers are excluded – not mentioned at all. At the other end of the spectrum is sentence 3, where ‘you’ is the agent and the company is excluded. Perhaps the most equal relationship is represented in sentence 2: both participants are referred to by personal pronouns and they are also both agents in different processes: the company ‘helps’, while the customer ‘understands’ and ‘has’. The first sentence could be rephrased in a number of ways. One improved version could be ‘We give our customers the kind of detailed personalised advice they require’, but you may well have other suggestions. Linguistic Landscapes works with a variety of organisations, including NGOs (non-governmental organisations) and charities. In the last part of the interview, Gill talks about work she has done with such ‘third sector’ organisations. Activity 7 Interview with Gill Ereaut part 3 Allow about 20 minutes Listen to the rest of the interview with Gill, where she talks about why her work benefits such organisations in particular. What makes linguistic analysis particularly powerful in the context of NGOs? GILL EREAUT So, some NGOs, some charities, for example, are about the right size for us because they have a relatively small decision making body and they can say, yeah, it makes sense, we want to do it. But there is another kind of project that we do which is to look at the public discourse of something. Many organisations – like a third-sector organisation and some public sector bodies – the public discourse is very important to them because that, in a sense, is a core issue for them – to disrupt or negotiate an existing public dominant discourse. And often, I think, those organisations … people in them might have already an awareness of the importance of a public discourse to what they’re trying to do. They will sometimes talk about … we need to change the language about X; and so what we’re offering them is a concrete way to map the X in order to be able to disrupt or to negotiate or to intervene or however they conceptualise what they’re doing. So we did some work looking at the public discourse around disability in the UK, and we did it for the major charity in the field. The headlines about the public discourse of disability are that – in the UK at the time we did the work which was 2013 – it seemed to us to be a very stable, almost ‘stagnant’ discourse. Very little kind of room for manoeuvre within it, and it had a lot of, I suppose, generalising, totalising kind of qualities to it. So, the disabled, ‘the disabled’, for a start, you know that form rather than ‘disabled people’ or any other kind of constructions, but those people with disabilities were consistently positioned as passive – as having things done to them – and you could see that again lexically, through metaphor and through transitivity. They were positioned as to be pitied. But what was most interesting in that piece of work was not the dominant discourse – it was useful to map it and actually show in a sense how profoundly stagnant it was – but were the peripheral counter-dominant discourses. There was some very interesting emergent kind of discourses that didn’t actually try to overtly overturn the dominance around passivity and so on – and otherness – but kind of sidestepped it. So, for example, there is a strand of comedy like The Last Leg, which was presented by three people: two of them had some kind of disability and one didn’t. It used the framework of a ‘ladsy’ late night chat show. It just happened upon disability from time to time. Disability was a topic, but it was a recurring topic like sex and football. And what we were talking about was the normalising without calling out. So it took disability into a powerfully attractive cultural frame of the late night ‘ladsy’ kind of chat show without saying we are about disability. Gill describes how charities and NGOs already tend to be aware of the power of language and often know that it can reveal assumptions and attitudes. They often require large-scale analyses of general language (discourse) around a particular topic in order to better gauge where society as a whole stands on an issue. In addition, they tend to have relatively small decision-making teams that are open to more innovative approaches. In the interview, Gill gives the example of her work with a leading UK disabilities charity and the way in which she and her colleagues were able to find alternative and powerful ways of talking about disability, as exemplified in the Channel 4 comedy series The Last Leg. The first series ran in 2012, offering an alternative view of the Summer Paralympics. Ever since it has regularly aired as a weekly look at events in the news, with a humorous take. Another fascinating project that Gill did involved Prostate Cancer UK – a charity dedicated to raising awareness for prostate cancer. She describes the issues that Linguistic Landscapes helped to address in a case study, ‘How language reveals barriers to success’, which appeared in the business magazine Market Leader. Activity 8 Facilitating organisation culture change Allow about 20 minutes In the case study, Gill focuses on how linguistic analysis can facilitate organisational culture change. Read the following excerpt from it below. As you read, think about what you’d expect the revamped website to look like. Prostate Cancer UK: renovating a brand from within In late 2011, the Prostate Cancer Charity was set in its ways and, although respected, was punching below its weight in terms of effectiveness. The charity knew it needed radical change and had appointed a new CEO and its first director of communications. It had ambitious targets for growth and a much higher public profile. In particular, it wanted to reach a more diverse range of men. The board committed to a project led by Seamus O’Farrell, the charity’s director of marketing and communications, titled ‘We, the Brand’. The brand was ostensibly the focus but many knew this also meant serious organisational and cultural change. Paul Feldwick was working with Seamus as brand and organisational consultant. He brought us into the team early in the brand redevelopment and we kicked off the process by examining forensically the language the charity used every day, both internally and externally. We dissected documents, spoke to people as they worked, listened to helpline calls, lurked in meetings and peered at notices on walls. We put all this language through rigorous analysis, looking for patterns and clues. The charity is deeply committed to science, knowledge and evidence, and this systematic approach made sense to them. When we had, as one of them put it, ‘fed us through the X-ray machine’, we shared the results initially with a large group – 50 or so people in one room, from all areas and levels, including the charity’s agencies and everyone helping with the rebranding process. The charity’s language showed some subtle but persistent features. Here are just some of them. There was habitual indirectness and distancing in language, and a marked use of euphemism and hyper-politeness. The density of text – enormously long reports, minutes, even newsletters and information sheets – was striking. There was medical and NHS language where you would expect it, but also often where you would not. While there were occasional bursts of outrage (at the plight of men with the disease) and fighting talk, especially by individuals in conversation, this was submerged. We characterised it as a ‘muffled’ discourse – soft, quiet, civilised and caring – but muffled. In fact, the office interior and brand identity (inasmuch as one existed) echoed this – nursing blue and white, rather bland and eerily calm. From micro examination of verb forms, we could see the charity tended always to position itself as acting outwards, on other people or things, while not (at least linguistically) allowing the possibility of other parties acting on it from the outside. This observation, as for others, produced a ripple of recognition – it articulated a habit or attitude that felt familiar. Theirs was, they recognised, a ‘very British, middle-class, educated, expert and somewhat paternalistic’ discourse. Let’s be clear: an organisation’s current culture, the one that’s holding it back, was once fully adapted to the strategic and market conditions of the time, and to the leadership that shaped it. It must have been, or the organisation wouldn’t have survived or been successful. Some elements may still be valuable. But the culture now contains attitudes, implied relationships and world views that are outgrown or outdated. And this is what had happened to the Prostate Cancer Charity. Things that had helped it succeed in the past had outlived their usefulness but were now baked into the culture, perpetuated through habits of language and, because invisible, very hard for them to change. (Ereaut, 2013) After you’ve read the excerpt, look at Figure 1 below, which is a screenshot of Prostate Cancer UK’s homepage. This is what the website looked like after Gill worked with the organisation (unfortunately, it is no longer possible to view what it looked like before). Can you see any evidence of the types of features that Gill describes as ‘very British, middle-class, educated, expert and somewhat paternalistic’: indirectness and distancing, use of euphemism and hyper-politeness, dense text, civilised and caring language? How is the audience of this website constructed in relation to the charity? Think about the use of material processes, use of imperatives (or commands) and who the language appears to be empowering.

Figure 1 Screenshot from Prostate Cancer UK in 2011 A screenshot from the Prostate Cancer UK website, taken in 2011. Note that the discussion for this activity includes a more detailed description of the language in the website screenshot.

There seems to be almost no evidence of indirectness, euphemism and hyper-politeness, or dense text (high lexical density). The audience is directly addressed (both charity and audience being referred to by personal pronouns) and construed as a strong collaborator with real power (‘we can win this’, ‘your tactical know how’). The voice of the charity’s audience is even given space and is directly represented in the form of quotes with picture in the bottom right of the screen. The audience is represented as being involved in material processes (‘win’, ‘beat’). They are also invited to act by a number of imperatives or commands (‘donate’, ‘speak to’, ‘call’, ‘see’, ‘order’, ‘tell us’, ‘get involved’). While imperatives can construct the people they are directed at as subservient, given the context here (the urgency of ‘doing something’) and other language that constructs the audience as collaborators, they seem to be empowering and motivating. All of this is supported by the strong colours on the page and by the gaze and pointing finger of Bill Bailey in the centre, a British comedian known for being irreverent, quirky, intelligent and well read. Given the objectives of the charity, do you think that these changes will have the desired effect on the people they are aiming to reach (i.e. possible donors and men in general)? As a result of Gill Ereaut’s work, Prostate Cancer UK gained visibility and is more successful as a charity. It even won the Third Sector Excellence Award in 2013 for this successful rebrand. If you’d like to follow this up further, you could look at the current Prostate Cancer UK website and consider what is the same and what has changed since 2011. At the time of writing in 2026, the website featured a Black man hugging a white man. The main headline was ‘It’s about time no man dies from prostate cancer’ and below this, text detailing how 1 in 8 men get prostate cancer but this is double for Black men. The use of the second person pronoun ‘you’ speaks directly to the reader . In this week, you have looked at the role of language and grammar in understanding and facilitating organisational culture change. As the work of Linguistic Landscapes and Gill Ereaut hopefully demonstrates, interventions based on linguistic analysis can have significant and concrete consequences in this context, both for organisations internally and for what they are trying to achieve. Next week you’ll focus on the language of doctor-patient dialogues and explore how conversation analysis can help in understanding communication. You can now go to Week 4. Week 4: Exploring the language of health communication Have you ever considered the place of language in medical settings? When you go to a doctor’s surgery, hospital, health centre or any healthcare setting and consult with a medical practitioner, who initiates the conversation? How do you address each other? And how formal or informal is the language used?

Figure 1 A medical practitioner checks a patient’s blood pressure The scene is in a medical consulting room, with a sink and examination couch visible in the background. A man (standing on the left) is having his blood pressure checked by a female medical practitioner (standing on the right).

This week you’ll look at an important aspect of the language of health communication: language used by medical practitioners such as doctors, nurses within their regular clinical practice. By the end of this week, you should be able to: understand some of the ways in which clinical consultation is managed, and how shared meaning is negotiated in doctor-patient dialogues see how conversation analysis is helpful in exploring oral communication try out the different stages in a medical consultation. Our experience of the world around us must be shaped into grammatical structures if we want to share it with other people. In the case of a medical consultation, the way this exchange of information is managed is particularly crucial. Equally important is that meaning is communicated in a way that opens up rather than closes down the dialogue. The medical practitioner needs to use appropriate means to elicit information and the patient needs to describe symptoms clearly and include all the information that might be relevant. In order to enable such exchanges to proceed smoothly, communication skills training now forms a prominent part of the training of doctors in the UK. Activity 1 Visiting the doctor Allow about 15 minutes Imagine yourself entering a doctor’s consulting room or cubicle as a patient, then make notes on the following questions. (If you are yourself a medical practitioner of any kind, you may prefer to reverse the roles, or alternatively think about how your experience as a practitioner may affect your behaviour as a patient.) Who is likely to utter the first words and what might you expect them to be? How do you address each other, and what effect does this have? What grammatical means might the doctor use to establish the reasons for your visit? What grammatical means might you use to describe your symptoms? Try to justify each of your responses in terms of what you know of the context and level of formality of a medical consultation. Below is an example answer, based on experience of the UK National Health Service, where patients often have a continuing relationship with their family doctors, or General Practitioners (GPs), over a period of years. Depending on your context, as well as your age and sex, your own experience may differ in any number of ways. After my name has been called at the GP practice, my doctor usually responds to a knock on her door and says: ‘(Please) come in!’ This bald imperative – or bluntly-stated command – is acceptable to us both, because I know the doctor has the controlling role in this clinical context. This is normally followed by an informal ‘Hello’, because she has known me for a long time. The doctor, who is female and slightly younger than me, usually addresses me by my first name, sometimes as part of the initial greeting, and, where relevant (e.g. when calling me at home to discuss medical matters) usually refers to herself by both first and family name. My instinct, because of the relative formality of our relationship, is to think of her as Dr X, so I usually avoid addressing her by name to circumvent the dilemma. I assume her first-naming of me is intended to put us on a more equal footing, which seems to work well for me in all but the reciprocity of naming! (If we were speaking one of the many languages, including French and Japanese, which make a grammatical distinction between the formal and the informal address systems we might mutually opt for the formal address form, in order to preserve the formality of the context and role relationships.) I would expect something along the lines of ‘So what brings you here today?’ or ‘How can I help you today then?’ I note that this implicit enquiry about my health is realised by a direct interrogative, again because the doctor is in the controlling role. The fact that it is quite likely to be preceded by an informal ‘so’ or followed by ‘then’ is partly a reflection of the fact this is an oral exchange, but also a implies a continuing dialogue, as I have been a patient of the same doctor for many years. I might begin with something like, ‘Well, I’ve been feeling rather dizzy when …’ or ‘I’m still a bit worried about the pain in …’. In other words, I would give myself agency in the utterance by the foregrounding of ‘I’, but would probably hedge – or soften - the statement (as in ‘rather’ or ‘a bit’) for fear of overstating my complaint and possibly as a way of showing some deference to the doctor’s role. I would expect an informal oral feature like ‘well’ to serve both as a link to the doctor’s question and as a ‘filler’ to give me thinking space in real time. In other cultures, or indeed other UK GP practices, this scenario might of course play out entirely differently, and so your responses may have been very different from these. And if you see different doctors each visit, then it’s likely that the dialogue will remain at a more formal level than in this example. Activity 2 Reflecting on contextual differences Allow about 10 minutes If your responses were significantly different from the example answer, you may find it useful to reflect on why this was so. For example: Do you have a very different role relationship with your doctor (reflected in the interpersonal nature of the exchange)? Do you have reasons to be less direct or explicit in expressing certain kinds of medical concerns (partly an issue of your familiarity with the field, and therefore your confidence in using the specialist technology, as well as the nature of your relationship with the doctor)? Did you perhaps overlook the specifically oral nature of the exchange (a matter of mode)? Would you attribute these differences primarily to your personal relationship with the doctor, or is it more a matter of cultural conventions in your own context? Are you perhaps not a first-language user of English, or are you more likely to be using another language in your encounters with the doctor? In the light of these, and any other, reflections, make any relevant additions to your notes. Keep your responses beside you to refer back to as you proceed through the rest of this week. Activity 3 A typical GP visit? Allow about 15 minutes Now compare your own responses and the example answer with the following genuine, but slightly abbreviated, consultation with a British family doctor or general practitioner (GP) in the 1970s. Do you notice any major differences and, if so, what aspects of the context do you think are responsible for these? Does the dialogue strike you as typical or not? Context = UK GP practice. D = Doctor and P = Patient D: Come in. Hello. How are you? P: I feel shocking. You know, when I came to see you last week and you knocked those capsules off – well, every morning when I get up, and my head – Doctor, you could have amputated it. It was a terrible headache and it was as if someone was dragging my eyeballs out. So I took more tablets. I haven’t had anything since… […] I’ve had bags under my eyes and all stuffy and watery, and at the moment, all the top of my head here feels as though there’s pressure on it and I feel this stuff going down the back of my throat. D: Are you coughing any of it out? P: No I can’t cough it out as… when I blow my nose it’s clear. D: Is your nose blocked? Lie your head back and I’ll have a look. P: Just here and inside of my throat is always very tender and all under here… […] and my head feels as if it’s going to fall off. D: Well, I’ll give you a change of tablets for that and when you’re over this I’ll start you back on the capsules. P: Well, all the aches and pains have gone, apart from under my ribs. D: Well, leave it a week and come and see me again. It sounds as if it’s the cold that’s affecting your sinuses. Right, so a week from today. P: Bye bye, now. (Byrne and Long, 1976, pp. 132–3, quoted by Harvey and Koteyko, 2013, pp. 12–13) You may have noted various indicators here of an established and apparently quite relaxed relationship between the GP and the patient. This may reflect the generally more stable and less time-pressured relationships between GPs and patients which prevailed at the time. However, you may still find it recognisable, especially if you visualise the patient as a particular kind of character. Linguistic indicators include: various features of informal speech (including ‘hello and ‘bye bye’, contractions like ‘it’s’ and ‘you’re’ and fillers like ‘well’ and ‘right’) a colloquial and non-technical/non-specialised choice of vocabulary on the part of not just the patient but the doctor too (e.g. I feel shocking, stuffy, stuff, coughing it out, when you’re over this, sounds as if) reference to an ongoing treatment programme (when I came to see you last week, so I took more tablets, start you back on the capsules, a week from today). However, what is also apparent here, particularly in its abbreviated form, is the way in which the exchange is structured according to a number of generic ‘moves’. The next section considers this generic structure of the clinical exchange. Drawing on an extensive database of clinical exchanges, the conversation analyst Paul ten Have (1989, quoted in Harvey and Koteyko, 2013, p. 10) carried out research into the generic ‘moves’ (or stages) in a typical healthcare consultation. He identified the following six generic moves occurring in the majority of in person consultations: opening complaint examination or test diagnosis treatment or advice closing. In the next activity, you’re asked to apply these moves to the earlier consultation dialogue. Activity 4 Typical stages of a clinical consultation Allow about 15 minutes Look again at the clinical exchange discussed in Activity 3 (and reproduced below). Using the highlighting tool, try to map the stages from ten Have’s framework, or as many as you can identify, onto the exchange. Make a note of any decisions that you find difficult. Use the different colours as follows: opening = yellow complaint = green examination or test = dark green diagnosis = purple treatment or advice = blue closing = red Although this is a relatively short exchange, it does clearly demonstrate all six stages. However, given that this is a repeat visit and the treatment is ongoing, the diagnosis stage does not follow immediately after the examination but appears to follow as an afterthought to the proposed adjustment to the treatment. You may have also hesitated whether to treat ‘How are you?’ as part of the opening, but came down in favour of treating it as the start of the complaint, partly because the opening might have been extended further and ‘How are you?’ seemed to mark a turning point, and partly because the patient’s response is clearly the second part of a question-and-answer exchange. These kinds of ‘moves’ or stages in a consultation, or other variants of them, are now regularly taught to medical students. However, what may be emerging from all that we have seen so far is that each of these moves may have very different linguistic realisations (meaning that different language is used to convey each move) and therefore a very different interpersonal effect. So a good doctor needs to be able to deploy a range of grammatical choices to elicit useful information from the patient, whilst continuing to maintain a relationship of trust. Similarly, as patients we have some control over how we choose to position ourselves through our grammatical choices (e.g. how much information versus how much hedging; how much assertion versus how much deference). Frameworks for the analysis of any human process vary and ten Have’s was written from the perspective of conversation analysis, a tradition of language study that focuses less on language per se than on the acts people carry out by speaking to one another, and typically pays more attention to phenomena such as conversational turn-taking, intonation and body language than to grammar. Other frameworks, such as the Calgary-Cambridge Guide (2015) might refer to the stages in the interaction slightly differently, focus on different linguistic features, or pay more attention to the audiences and purposes This week has only considered human to human communication within the limited setting of a doctor’s surgery. The field of health communication is far broader than this, ranging from patient information leaflets to online health forums. You may also make use of online symptom checkers before speaking to a human about any health concerns – and the future of health communication might well come to rely on chatbots as ‘conversational agents’ drawing on rapid advances in both artificial intelligence and digital technology (Laymouna et al., 2024). It’s interesting to consider how this might affect the ensuing conversation. Hopefully the material this week has given you some insight into how doctors and other healthcare practitioners can use linguistic means to elicit valuable information from patients that will help them in their diagnosis, whether steering them more tightly towards fixed responses, or opening up possibilities for them to express their concerns more freely. Doctors learn to convey their diagnoses to patients in a sensitive way and with due caution. Understanding the different stages of a medical consultation can help practitioners to see how the encounter unfolds from both patient’s and doctor’s perspectives. In Week 5 you’ll learn about the work of a speech and language therapist and the role of language analysis in this job. You can now go to Week 5. If you’re interested in reading more about conversation analysis, you might like to look at Paul ten Have’s book on this: ten Have, P. (2007) Doing conversation analysis: A practical guide (2nd edn). Sage Publications Ltd. Available at: https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.4135/9781849208895 To read more on health communication, you could look at the following account which draws on 29 million words of online patient feedback on the NHS in the UK and 11 million words in responses from NHS providers: Baker, P., Brookes, G. and Evans, C. (2019) The Language of Patient Feedback: A Corpus Linguistic Study of Online Health Communication. (Routledge Applied Corpus Linguistics). Available at: https://www.research.lancs.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/the-language-of-patient-feedback(966185ac-1a14-44e1-b7b5-4f7290099022).html. This link takes you to a linguistic toolkit for health and social care which offers suggestions for giving advice: https://www.open.edu/openlearn/an-advice-giving-toolkit. Week 5: The work of a speech and language therapist

Figure 1 A speech and language specialist at work A photograph of a speech language therapist working with a child.

Have you ever considered what a speech and language therapist might do in their daily work? What kinds of issues might they come across when working with children’s speech and language? The focus of this week is on how speech and language therapists (conventionally abbreviated to SLTs) treat children with difficulties in linguistic expression. While SLTs can work with either children or adults, in this week the focus is solely on children and in particular on children who are exposed to more than one language in their daily lives. By the end of this week, you should be able to: be more familiar with the work of a speech and language therapist describe some of the issues involved in developmental delays in children of different ages. In this week, you’ll listen to an interview – divided into three segments – with senior speech and language therapist, Dr Sean Pert, and hear him talk about his approach to his work, including his experience of working with multilingual children (Pert, 2023). In the area of the north-west of England where Sean works, a large proportion of the local population, and consequently a large proportion of the children referred to him for support, are of Pakistani heritage and encounter at least two, and often three or four, spoken languages in their daily environment: typically, the unwritten ‘local dialect’ Mirpuri and the regional language Punjabi, as well as local and national varieties of English. When referring to the experience of children in such contexts, and in line with common practice among linguists, Sean uses the terms ‘bilingual’ and ‘bilingualism’ to embrace ‘multilingual’ and ‘multilingualism’. As with any other population of children, a small proportion of these children will experience language delays or disorders. You’re now going to listen to the first part of an audio interview with speech and language therapist, Sean Pert. Activity 1 The role of an SLT Allow about 15 minutes As you listen to Sean, make notes on the following questions. How does Sean define the three aspects of an SLT’s work? What linguistic functions does Sean identify as being of particular importance at different stages of a child’s development? Sean Pert: Hello, my name’s Sean Pert. I’m a speech and language therapist. Today I’m going to be talking about children with speech, language and communication needs. I’ve worked for about 19 years in the north-west of England with children with a whole range of speech, language and communication needs, including those who are bilingual and have difficulty learning to speak in their own languages. Speech and language therapists have in their title both ‘speech’ and ‘language’ and that’s because children have difficulties with either speech – that’s the physical production of sounds, and the mental representation of those sounds, so they might be able to physically say a sound but not have learnt when to use that sound yet – or with language – so that incorporates verbal comprehension and verbal expression. But we also have speech and language therapists who deal with, for example, children who aren’t able to use verbal communication and use computer technology to communicate. So you might describe it as communication of any modality. When children need to express themselves, particularly the younger children that we see – so I would say children under five – they’re getting their basic messages across. And if you think about the stages of language development, children often talk about what they’re doing; so they’re almost thinking out loud: ‘Look mum, I’m riding a bike’, ‘I’ve got a new hat’ – things that they find exciting about the world around them. For older children, they tend to start to question how things happen, how everyday events relate to themselves. So they tend to ask more questions: ‘Where does water come from?’, ‘Do birds have television sets?’ – you know, they have all sorts of flights of fantasy, and they start to learn about the real workings of the world. Teenagers start to think about much bigger issues and think about maybe political issues or moral issues. So the language skills that relate to that are different at different points in the child’s life. So for young children basic sentence structure is really important. Children – seven, eight and nine – are having difficulties perhaps with making friends, with understanding the pragmatic rules and the language skills they need to do things like narrative; so, to talk about what they did at school that day, or if they went on a school trip, the sequence of events and how to explain that to others who weren’t there to see it. Older teenagers, often labelled as having behavioural difficulties, can turn out to have language impairment, and they have much more subtle difficulties, such as understanding when somebody needs further information to understand their point of debate or to understand their perspective. So they need to understand things like theory of mind and understanding someone else’s perspective, using language to persuade, to question, to probe. So, in that sense, language skills need to mature. Sean distinguishes between speech (the physical production of sounds) and language (the mental representation of those sounds, in other words the comprehension and expression of meaning). To these he adds ‘communication needs’ and relates this to other modalities, some of them technologically mediated, by children who lack the ability to produce speech. You may have noted that he refers to ‘children who aren’t able to use verbal communication and use computer technology to communicate’, meaning communication through spoken language. The broader meaning of verbal in linguistics covers spoken, written and also signed language and it should be noted that some computer technologies may actually rely on verbal means, such as written words or words sounded out electronically, whereas others may rely on a more direct relationship between action and image. In this instance, the children Sean is referring to in his response are clearly those who are unable to use oral communication. Sean explains that very young children tend predominantly to use descriptive commentary on actions in the here-and-now (‘almost thinking out loud’), using present tense descriptions in basic sentences. Slightly older children ask more questions and find themselves needing to give narrative accounts of events to people who were not present at the time. Teenagers begin to use language for more complex functions such as persuasion and more speculative language relating to moral choices, drawing inevitably on a wider range of processes. These evolving communicative purposes will apply regardless of which language is chosen by the child. You will shortly listen to the second part of the interview with Sean Pert, where he talks about the gestures and coloured blocks that he uses to draw children’s attention to the different elements in a simple transitive clause. These form part of an intervention programme called BEST, or Building Early Sentences Therapy, run from the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University in collaboration with Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust (Newcastle University, 2016).

Figure 2 Building Early Sentences Therapy The BEST logo.

Activity 2 How Sean Pert approaches his work as an SLT Allow about 15 minutes As you listen to Sean, consider the following questions. What strategies does Sean use in the therapeutic context to encourage meaningful communication? Which aspects of language use is Sean particularly keen to foster in the children? Which aspects does he regard as less important? Sean Pert: When speech and language therapists assess children’s spoken language, there used to be a big emphasis on plugging gaps of the surface structure. There’s increasing interest in the profession around ‘pragmatics’ and the functional use of language. Children will really remember how to use a particular linguistic structure if they learn that in a motivating situation. So, for example, to try and motivate children we might do things like sabotage games; so ask them to talk about the food that’s in front of them, but put the food out of reach so they have to ask for it, or ask them to play a game with a partner or with another child and sabotaging that. So removing some of the vital things that they need, so that children have to ask each other for those objects and activities. This is a good way of motivating them because it feels more real to children. Just having children repeat spoken sentences is very dull, very boring and not very relevant to their experience. But if they have to ask another child for some bricks to make a model or some object to complete a game, then they find that very motivating and are more likely to interact. If you aren’t used to hearing a language, and children in that position where they're a little linguist trying to sort out where the word boundaries are, how the meanings map on to the surface structure, they need lots of examples. So we would highlight it in various ways. The first way is to give them lots of examples where you contrast one part of the sentence. So, for example, we may have different agents with the same action and patient. So it might be ‘The man is kicking the ball’, ‘The girl is kicking the ball’, ‘The boy is kicking the ball’; so that helps the child to abstract the phrase boundaries. We would also give them support by giving them choices. So we might say ‘Is the man kicking the ball or is the girl throwing the ball?’, so that they can hear a good model, rather than being asked what’s happening where nothing is there to support their communication. Interestingly, children will often think that they have produced a full sentence, but would omit whole parts of the sentence, particularly the patient seems to be quite a universal thing – that if it’s understood because they can see that it’s a man kicking the ball, they might not mention it, because they assume it’s a mutually understood part of the sentence. So we use visual signs and those signs can be more or less formal depending on the needs of the child. For some children that would mean, simply, a gesture to indicate that a word or a morpheme is expected. For other children it might be pointing to different coloured bricks, so that they know that something is there that’s needed to be said. They then link that to the effect that their spoken utterances have on others. So, for example, if they’re able to request something they gain the object that they desire, and that reinforces their willingness and their motivation to use that structure again. Sean tries to create realistic and enjoyable communicative situations, where children have a genuine motivation to contribute. He also aims to model plenty of contrasting linguistic examples for them, so that they can isolate the roles played by the different parts of a sentence, in other words identify the boundaries between grammatical groups which Sean refers to as phrase boundaries). In this context, he regards the children as ‘little linguists’ trying to work out the rules. You may well have experience of this kind of ‘pattern drilling’ yourself as a learner or teacher of other languages. Sean is primarily interested in fostering children’s ability to engage meaningfully with others through spoken language. He is only interested in the surface form of the child’s utterance to the extent that this is crucial to the meaning, for example if changing a verb tense or the number of participants is important to communicating the message at hand. Conversely, though, he does insist that children include in their utterances all the key meaning-bearing elements of the sentence (in his terms, all the relevant semantic roles). In a face-to-face situation it may be natural for children to communicate multimodally, for example by pointing or gazing at one of the participants in the utterance, but it is Sean’s role to ensure that the children referred to him are capable of expressing grammatical relations linguistically.

Figure 3 An SLT works one-to-one with a young child An SLT sits across a table from a boy of about 3. She is miming a mouth shape which the boy appears to be imitating. They have eye-contact and are smiling.

Activity 3 Assessing the meaning-making abilities of a bilingual child Allow about 10 minutes Whether you are yourself monolingual (with English as your only language), bilingual (using two languages) or multilingual (two or more languages), pause for a moment and note down (ideally in discussion with others) what might be the particular challenges for a therapist or teacher in assessing the language abilities of a child with multiple languages. Would you expect the process to be fundamentally the same or different for a bilingual or multilingual child? You may have thought that what may be diagnosed as a delay in language acquisition may simply be a reflection of the additional learning load for the bilingual child, or of grammatical differences between the languages involved. Specifically, children who have been raised speaking a language other than English in the home may be misjudged by some educational or health professionals as having a language disorder if they get the English word order wrong, or don’t use basic word endings such as the -s for plural nouns or third person singular verbs (e.g. sits, bakes) that would be expected of the usual development of monolingual children. According to the conventions of their first language, bilingual children may also respond to questions or prompts differently, with a choice of yes or no that differs from the conventions of standard English. Alternatively they may have been brought up to regard silence as the appropriate response to an adult’s questioning, in other words they may have acquired different cultural behaviours in their first language community that are not a matter of language structures alone. This is not an exhaustive list, and you may well have identified other aspects of a bilingual child’s behaviour that could potentially mislead a professional into underestimating the child’s linguistic skills. You may perhaps have also considered some of the additional skills that the bilingual child might possess which could be hidden by a conventional monolingual assessment. Activity 4 What special linguistic skills do bilinguals develop? Allow about 15 minutes Now listen to the third part of the interview with Sean Pert. What does Sean identify as the particular insights that bilingualism can bring? (Note that Sean refers at several points to Mirpuri, the Pakistani heritage language spoken by the children alongside English.) Sean Pert: I work with bilingual children, mostly from a Pakistani heritage background. Children will hear codeswitching, very frequently from their parents, because they’re living in a bilingual world. So they will use English, for example, when they’re out shopping, and they will hear Mirpuri, their home language, when they’re talking to friends and relatives. And often the community have parents where one parent would speak Mirpuri, another would speak Punjabi, and all of them would speak English to some degree. Many professionals, and indeed parents, believe that bilingualism is a disadvantage, particularly for education, because education tends to be delivered in the medium of English. Many parents say to me ‘Are you going to look at my child’s English skills?’, and I reply ‘No, I’m going to look at their strongest language, which is your home language.’ Parents are quite surprised that once children have a foundation home language, I don’t need to see them anymore because they naturally acquire English spontaneously using their own resources and the strategies and techniques that they’ve learnt via acquiring their home language. It isn’t bilingualism itself which causes speech and language problems, they just happen to have difficulties in the same way as other monolingual English children do. Children who hear two languages in their community are very likely to do that themselves. So, for example, they would insert content words, particularly, into a grammatical frame, but the grammatical frame itself would maintain the integrity of the home language that was selected. So, for example, in Mirpuri, which is a Pakistani heritage language, they have the agent, the patient and the action in that order. So, for example, ‘The girl is eating a banana’ would be ‘[SPEAKING MIRPURI]’, and that’s literally ‘The girl banana eating’. In codeswitching, children are just as likely to say ‘A girl banana eat [canipy]’, that way they’ve inserted the English lexical items of ‘girl’ and ‘banana’ and what the children do there is do a dummy doing verb, just doing, to hold the gender agreement and the morphology. This is very sophisticated and this is something that children from around the age of three and a half are able to do, which, not coincidentally, is the same age that monolingual English children become able to use morphology confidently. So we can see that children who are able to insert English words into their home-language frame are sophisticated language users and therefore are not cause for concern. Interestingly, children with specific language impairment who are bilingual are unable to integrate two languages together; and children who don’t codeswitch in this way are therefore good candidates for further investigation to see if they are having difficulties with their language acquisition. Actually, bilingual children have an advantage in that they can see that the surface pattern is exactly that. So an item like ‘banana’ they’ll hear it called ‘banana’ and ‘kela’, so they can see that it’s a surface lexical item that’s attached to a deeper meaning. So bilingual children have this unique perspective, they can see both sides of the linguistic labelling system. They're also exposed to two different syntax and grammar structures when they're hearing English and Mirpuri, so they very quickly become adept at acquiring languages. It’s interesting that children who remain bilingual seem to have an advantage when it comes to acquiring additional languages and also in their metalinguistic skills in general. Sean notes that bilingual people are particularly skilled at separating form from function, in other words their access to two languages shows them that the same (or at least closely related) meaning can be expressed in lexically and grammatically different ways. Most bilingual people also have the additional skill of being able to codeswitch – or shift rapidly between languages – at grammatically appropriate points; indeed the failure to develop this skill might itself be seen as a disorder in normal bilingual development. Both these skills are frequently overlooked or undervalued by parents and teachers – a situation that Sean tries to address in his daily work. This week has shown how speech and language therapists work with children who experience a whole range of language disorders or delays in acquisition. In some geographical areas, such as the one in which Sean Pert works, many of these children will happen to be multilingual. Bilingual children are in the privileged position of being able to distinguish between the function of what they want to say (which may be largely independent of the language they choose to speak at any given moment) and the linguistic form that this normally takes in any one language. In order to diagnose and support children appropriately, it is clearly an advantage if professionals have some insight, as Sean Pert does, into the different structures of the languages spoken by the children they are working with. As Sean points out, children with two or more languages will soon ‘catch up’ with monolingual children’s development and will then have the great advantage of being able to communicated in multiple languages. If you’d like to follow up on the BEST project, you could explore their site here: Building Early Sentences Therapy and also the LIVELY research project that gave rise to BEST: Language Intervention in the Early Years. And if you’re a parent, carer or work with young children – or if you’re interested in perhaps becoming a speech and language therapist, you may be interested in the resources page here: Useful Links. In Week 6 you’ll learn about the kind of language a mediator might use and why. You can now go to Week 6, the final week of the course. Week 6: Exploring the language of mediation

Figure 1 The mediation process A photograph of a group of adults and a child sitting at a table.

‘I’m wondering if...’ ‘It sounds like …’ ‘You seem distracted’ ‘Am I right in …’ ‘So you think Barry’s a bully?’ Which of these phrases do you think a mediator might say – and which would they probably not say?! (Hint: Three are recommended sentence starters by the mediator you’ll hear from in this week, and two are to be avoided.) You’ll find out more about this language in a later activity. This week you’ll learn about the relevance of language to a specialised area of professional practice: mediation and conflict resolution. You’ll listen to a professional mediator talk about the key role of language in her professional practice. You’ll learn about the way in which mediators consciously shape their own language and seek to influence the way their clients talk to one another, in order to achieve successful outcomes in mediation. By the end of this week, you should be able to: describe the work of a mediator understand the kind of language that a mediator might use and why describe some of this language using linguistic terminology. Mediation can be described as a ‘process in which impartial third parties … help disputants reach their own agreements by facilitating communication and suggesting compromises’ (Greatbatch and Dingwall, 1999, p. 271). Mediators play a role in many large organisations in helping to resolve disputes between individuals and groups without the need for formal action or litigation. They are also employed to help resolve disputes between individuals, for example divorcing couples, so that expensive and stressful court battles might be avoided. While in Roman law, mediation existed in the concept of an ‘“intermediatory” – internuncius, medium, interpolator, conciliator, interpres and mediator’ (Kokoeva et.al., 2022), in its modern form, mediation as a distinct professional domain is relatively new, dating from the second half of the twentieth century. It began to grow as an area of practice in English-speaking countries such as the UK and USA in response to widespread dissatisfaction with legal procedures and processes, particularly where family disputes (e.g. divorce proceedings) were concerned, and was then adopted in other countries in Europe including Russia (Kokoeva et.al., (2022). Professionals involved were looking for ways to de-escalate conflicts that came to their attention, in order to avoid court cases that might be emotionally and financially damaging for families already undergoing a difficult situation. From the outset, the model of professional practice that underpinned mediation was very different from that of traditional professions such as law or medicine, moving away from the notion of professional as ‘expert’ with sole responsibility for the outcome of their intervention. As one professional mediator explained: In mediation, the professional–client relationship is fundamentally reshaped … He or she attributes to clients, as well as to himself or herself, a capacity to mean, know, and plan … the professional is accountable not so much for the outcome but for the process of engagement. (Benjamin, 1990, p. 108) Mediation remains an important element of the family law system in some countries, and has become an established option for individuals and organisations seeking to deal with conflict in a wide range of other contexts including: workplace conflicts industrial disputes dealing with complaints about public services such as health or social care community and neighbourhood disputes restorative justice. Because of the important role of talk in mediation as a ‘process of engagement’, the language used by mediators themselves, and by their clients in mediation interactions, has been a subject of interest to some linguistic researchers. For example, Greatbatch and Dingwall (1999) use Conversation Analysis (CA) – which you have read about in previous weeks – to examine the way in which mediators are able to maintain a ‘neutralistic’ stance in mediations, with the cooperation of the disputing parties – even where they may be seeking to shape the outcome, for example to protect the interests of children in cases of separation and divorce. The insights derived from research have then sometimes been used to develop training for professional mediators and others involved in conflict resolution. For example, linguist Liz Stokoe has also used CA to explore interactions in neighbourhood disputes and in police interviews; her analysis has been used as the basis for a form of communication training that has been widely adopted by mediators (Stokoe, 2014). Some work has also been done using Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to understand the language of mediation in restorative justice (Martin et al., 2013). In this section you will use two key concepts from functional grammar – the interpersonal and ideational metafunctions – to explore language use in the work of professional mediator Katherine Graham. Katherine is the Chief Executive of CMP Resolutions, a company based in Hertfordshire in the UK. She has worked for twenty-five years as a professional mediator, and CMP works with a wide range of clients, including large and small companies, local authorities and charitable organisations. Katherine also provides and validates professional training for mediators. Before you turn to the first activity, briefly reflect on what you think is important in the language use of a mediator: is there anything they should say – or avoid saying in their role? Do you think a mediator might try to regulate the language their clients use in mediation sessions? And if so, in what ways might they do this? Activity 1 The importance of choosing words carefully in mediation Allow about 20 minutes Listen to the audio clip of Katherine Graham and make notes on what you learn about: the importance of language in the profession of mediation how Katherine describes the language that mediators themselves try to use in mediation sessions with clients how she describes the language that mediators try to get their clients to use in mediation sessions (note clients are often referred to as ‘the parties’). JACKIE: Hello, I’m Jackie Tuck from The Open University. With me is Katherine Graham, Managing Director of CMP Resolutions, a company based in Hertfordshire, and I’ll be talking to her about the language used in mediation and conflict resolution. Katherine, could I ask you how important it is for a mediator to be aware of the language they’re using? KATHERINE It’s really important because it’s one of the only tools they’ve got available to them, and it can be a very explosive matter if you get it wrong. So even a single word like ‘respect’ or ‘professional’ can ignite the conflict that you’ve come to resolve. So, being mindful of the words that you’re using, when you’re using them, which part of the process you’re in, who you’re addressing – all of those different choices make up the personality of the mediation because you’re setting the tone, you’re setting the feeling of the mediation with the language that you use. JACKIE Would you be able to give me some examples of the types of language which are usually a good idea for a mediator to employ? KATHERINE The types of language that we’d really want mediators to use would be descriptive words, descriptive language. You want to avoid anything that’s analytical or logical or evaluative. So if somebody’s rocking on their chair and looking out of the window, you would say ‘I noticed you’re rocking on the chair and looking out of the window and I’m wondering what’s going on for you’, rather than saying ‘You seem distracted’, which would be a judgement and an evaluative comment. So you’re constantly looking at ways of reflecting back what you’re seeing, what you’re hearing, what you’re wondering, using language which is as open and tentative as possible. So mediators will typically use a lot of those fluffy bits at the beginning and the end of sentences, like ‘I’m wondering if …’, or ‘It sounds like …’, or ‘Am I right in …’, because you want them to feel that they can correct you. You want them to give you the steer and for them to end up saying what it is that they’re feeling or believing. So you’d also use the party’s language a lot as well, but reframe it. So if they say ‘He’s an absolute bully and if he moves the papers on my desk one more time I’m gonna make a complaint,’ you would never as a mediator say ‘So you think Barry’s a bully?’, because that is almost solidifying their experience and it’s giving it some legitimacy. So you use their language but you reframe it. So you might say something like ‘It sounds as though your desk is a very private space for you and you have a really strong reaction when Barry touches things on your desk and for you, you feel that that’s bullying.’ You might offer it back but with some softenings, some descriptive language. When you’re mediating you will try and influence the way the parties are speaking, sometimes in very explicit ways. You might ask them to say something positive about each other. So you’re trying to rebalance perhaps some of the negative versus positive stuff in the room. You might quite explicitly tell them to use ‘I’ statements, not ‘you’ statements, because parties are very, very happy to say ‘you’re lazy’, ‘you’re intolerable’, ‘I can’t bear you’, which isn’t what you’re after, they need to really use an ‘I’ statement. So there’s quite a lot of coaching going on. And you would say ‘Well can you tell me what you feel?’ And the party will say ‘Yes I feel you’re being unreasonable.’ And you’ll have to go back and say ‘Actually that’s a thought. You think they’re being unreasonable. Can you tell me how you feel?’ And they’ll say ‘I feel he's bullying me.’ And that’s another projected, labelling evaluative statement. So you have to say ‘No. How do you feel?’ And eventually they might say ‘I feel overwhelmed’. You’ll also find that sometimes you need to be more robust, as a mediator. It’s not all pink and fluffy and ‘How do you feel?’. Sometimes you need to stop people who are raising their voice or going off track. And so mediators will also be quite clear and precise. So you’re changing the language according to how much control you should be exerting over the interaction. So when you need to be more authoritative, you’ll shift your tone, you’ll shift your pace, you’ll start using their names, and you’ll be much, much more descriptive about what you want them to do. And there should be a continuum: you always start with the softest most interactive intervention and save anything that’s a reference to a ‘rule’, in inverted commas, right to the bitter end. So if you can’t persuade them and encourage them to change how they’re talking to one another, for example, then you will ask, and then if that doesn’t work you might explicitly say ‘We came here on the understanding that both of you were going to have a chance to speak to one another: Janet you’re not letting James speak. I want to check with each of you, are you still here to help each other to speak and listen?’ And then they’ll go ‘Yes, yes’. And then you’ll say ‘Okay, in that case, Janet, it’s your turn to be quiet, James away you go.’ So you’ll be quite tough sometimes. Another example of the type of language that you typically use as a mediator would be mutual language, so you’ll hear mediators saying ‘we’ a lot, rather than ‘I’ or ‘you’. You’ll hear them saying ‘You both seem to …’, or ‘This seems a shared experience’. So you’re using language to indicate the connection that they should have or that they’re aspiring to have. One of the things I like to do is to make sure that I’m using really homely phrases, kind of ordinary language. I know that I’ve had it fed back to me from some co-workers that when I mediate I am obviously working in the room quite spontaneously with language that’s occurring to me at the time. So I may well say things like ‘Okay, let’s crack on, we’ve only got another hour left and we’ve got a heck of a lot to get through.’ Because you’re all in it together, and you want to allow them to see you as an ordinary person, not a special technical user of grandiose language. When you train people, they’re always wanting a phrase book and they’re very frustrated that you’re not going to give them one, because the key skill is to be alive and creative in each conversation – in each moment of each conversation. So you’re always focusing on what's happening in the room at the time, and it can be really exhausting. And you need to pull all your language resources together, and concentrate on the moment to say the right thing in such a way that it’s going to be helpful. And so you are always living in the moment when you’re in the mediation. And that’s why I like doing it, because you can't prepare for it. You just rock up and, you know, you always go with what the parties bring you. It’s brilliant. Katherine makes clear the importance of language in mediation – as she explains, ‘it’s one of the only tools you’ve got to work with’. Mediation is a good example of a professional activity in which language is central to getting things done, rather than simply an accompaniment to other sorts of (non-verbal) action. Katherine also makes clear the potentially ‘explosive’ consequences of particular word choices, where even words such as ‘respect’ or ‘professional’, with no obvious problematic overtones, can stir up conflict between ‘the parties’ in the mediation. Given the extreme delicacy of the interpersonal relations, which usually form the background to any attempt at mediation, a finely tuned attention to the word choices being made is essential for anyone in the profession. Katherine describes the language she tries to use as a mediator in several ways. She refers to:language that is ‘descriptive’ rather than ‘analytical, logical or … evaluative’using language that is ‘as open and tentative as possible’‘offering back’, or reformulating clients’ language, but with ‘softenings’her conscious choice to use, as she calls them, ‘fluffy bits at the beginnings and ends of sentences’using ‘ordinary language’ so as to avoid seeming ‘grandiose’being ‘quite tough sometimes’. Katherine also discusses ways in which she as a mediator might try to ‘influence the way the parties are speaking’. For example, she explicitly asks them to:say positive things about each otheruse ‘I’ statements not ‘you’ statementslisten and allow each other to speak. Clearly, Katherine is using very informal metalanguage (language about language) here – ‘pink and fluffy’ is not a linguistic term – and this is appropriate: for example, she frequently talks to trainee mediators who generally will not have a background in linguistics. And as you heard in the audio clip, she explains that she seeks to use ‘ordinary language’. However, it is also important to note here that even where Katherine is using vocabulary that more closely resembles linguistic terminology (e.g. ‘descriptive’, ‘judgment’), she is not employing these terms precisely in the same ways as they are used in many branches of linguistics. In the activities that follow, you will have an opportunity to explore what Katherine means in terms related to this module, and to explore how linguistics can explain the role of language in mediation more systematically. A further point to note is that we don’t have an authentic mediation interaction here, just someone’s report of typical ways of talking in mediation. However, there are some useful clues as to the nature of the interactional and social roles played by the different participants. When Katherine explains that, on occasion, it’s necessary to remind the parties that, ‘We came here on the understanding that both of you were going to have a chance to speak to one another … I want to check with each of you, are you still here to help each other to speak and listen,’ we get a clear indication that there are conventionalised, unwritten ‘rules’ of interaction in a professional mediation, which everyone has more or less explicitly signed up to, and which include being willing to allow the other people in the room to speak or ‘take the floor’ in the conversation. Moreover, here we have evidence that all parties accept that it is the mediator’s role to enforce such rules of interaction and that, echoing Benjamin (1990), she’s ‘accountable … for the process of engagement’. In the next activity you’ll listen again to the audio clip. Activity 2 Interpersonal meaning in mediators’ talk Allow about 30 minutes Listen to the clip again and, as you listen, focus in particular on the ‘typical’ phrases or sentences that Katherine gives as illustrations of mediators’ talk. In particular: Think back at the five sentences given at the start of this week and note which ones Katherine says mediators might say and which they would not:‘I’m wondering if...’‘It sounds like …’‘You seem distracted’‘Am I right in …’‘So you think Barry’s a bully?’ Jot down some of the examples of mediators’ language given. Make a note of the interpersonal meanings expressed overall in terms of:speaker roles and the relative social status of participantsthe social distance between participants i.e. are they of equal standing or does one person have power over anotherspeaker positioning. You might find it helpful to make a note of Katherine’s own explanations of the type of talk she tries to use as a mediator, in relation to these interpersonal aspects. JACKIE: Hello, I’m Jackie Tuck from The Open University. With me is Katherine Graham, Managing Director of CMP Resolutions, a company based in Hertfordshire, and I’ll be talking to her about the language used in mediation and conflict resolution. Katherine, could I ask you how important it is for a mediator to be aware of the language they’re using? KATHERINE It’s really important because it’s one of the only tools they’ve got available to them, and it can be a very explosive matter if you get it wrong. So even a single word like ‘respect’ or ‘professional’ can ignite the conflict that you’ve come to resolve. So, being mindful of the words that you’re using, when you’re using them, which part of the process you’re in, who you’re addressing – all of those different choices make up the personality of the mediation because you’re setting the tone, you’re setting the feeling of the mediation with the language that you use. JACKIE Would you be able to give me some examples of the types of language which are usually a good idea for a mediator to employ? KATHERINE The types of language that we’d really want mediators to use would be descriptive words, descriptive language. You want to avoid anything that’s analytical or logical or evaluative. So if somebody’s rocking on their chair and looking out of the window, you would say ‘I noticed you’re rocking on the chair and looking out of the window and I’m wondering what’s going on for you’, rather than saying ‘You seem distracted’, which would be a judgement and an evaluative comment. So you’re constantly looking at ways of reflecting back what you’re seeing, what you’re hearing, what you’re wondering, using language which is as open and tentative as possible. So mediators will typically use a lot of those fluffy bits at the beginning and the end of sentences, like ‘I’m wondering if …’, or ‘It sounds like …’, or ‘Am I right in …’, because you want them to feel that they can correct you. You want them to give you the steer and for them to end up saying what it is that they’re feeling or believing. So you’d also use the party’s language a lot as well, but reframe it. So if they say ‘He’s an absolute bully and if he moves the papers on my desk one more time I’m gonna make a complaint,’ you would never as a mediator say ‘So you think Barry’s a bully?’, because that is almost solidifying their experience and it’s giving it some legitimacy. So you use their language but you reframe it. So you might say something like ‘It sounds as though your desk is a very private space for you and you have a really strong reaction when Barry touches things on your desk and for you, you feel that that’s bullying.’ You might offer it back but with some softenings, some descriptive language. When you’re mediating you will try and influence the way the parties are speaking, sometimes in very explicit ways. You might ask them to say something positive about each other. So you’re trying to rebalance perhaps some of the negative versus positive stuff in the room. You might quite explicitly tell them to use ‘I’ statements, not ‘you’ statements, because parties are very, very happy to say ‘you’re lazy’, ‘you’re intolerable’, ‘I can’t bear you’, which isn’t what you’re after, they need to really use an ‘I’ statement. So there’s quite a lot of coaching going on. And you would say ‘Well can you tell me what you feel?’ And the party will say ‘Yes I feel you’re being unreasonable.’ And you’ll have to go back and say ‘Actually that’s a thought. You think they’re being unreasonable. Can you tell me how you feel?’ And they’ll say ‘I feel he's bullying me.’ And that’s another projected, labelling evaluative statement. So you have to say ‘No. How do you feel?’ And eventually they might say ‘I feel overwhelmed’. You’ll also find that sometimes you need to be more robust, as a mediator. It’s not all pink and fluffy and ‘How do you feel?’. Sometimes you need to stop people who are raising their voice or going off track. And so mediators will also be quite clear and precise. So you’re changing the language according to how much control you should be exerting over the interaction. So when you need to be more authoritative, you’ll shift your tone, you’ll shift your pace, you’ll start using their names, and you’ll be much, much more descriptive about what you want them to do. And there should be a continuum: you always start with the softest most interactive intervention and save anything that’s a reference to a ‘rule’, in inverted commas, right to the bitter end. So if you can’t persuade them and encourage them to change how they’re talking to one another, for example, then you will ask, and then if that doesn’t work you might explicitly say ‘We came here on the understanding that both of you were going to have a chance to speak to one another: Janet you’re not letting James speak. I want to check with each of you, are you still here to help each other to speak and listen?’ And then they’ll go ‘Yes, yes’. And then you’ll say ‘Okay, in that case, Janet, it’s your turn to be quiet, James away you go.’ So you’ll be quite tough sometimes. Another example of the type of language that you typically use as a mediator would be mutual language, so you’ll hear mediators saying ‘we’ a lot, rather than ‘I’ or ‘you’. You’ll hear them saying ‘You both seem to …’, or ‘This seems a shared experience’. So you’re using language to indicate the connection that they should have or that they’re aspiring to have. One of the things I like to do is to make sure that I’m using really homely phrases, kind of ordinary language. I know that I’ve had it fed back to me from some co-workers that when I mediate I am obviously working in the room quite spontaneously with language that’s occurring to me at the time. So I may well say things like ‘Okay, let’s crack on, we’ve only got another hour left and we’ve got a heck of a lot to get through.’ Because you’re all in it together, and you want to allow them to see you as an ordinary person, not a special technical user of grandiose language. When you train people, they’re always wanting a phrase book and they’re very frustrated that you’re not going to give them one, because the key skill is to be alive and creative in each conversation – in each moment of each conversation. So you’re always focusing on what's happening in the room at the time, and it can be really exhausting. And you need to pull all your language resources together, and concentrate on the moment to say the right thing in such a way that it’s going to be helpful. And so you are always living in the moment when you’re in the mediation. And that’s why I like doing it, because you can't prepare for it. You just rock up and, you know, you always go with what the parties bring you. It’s brilliant. Katherine suggests that a), b) and d) are examples of mediator’s language. Example c) is rather evaluative and the mediator is more likely to comment on the physical manifestation of the client’s behaviour (‘I noticed you’re rocking on the chair … and I’m wondering what’s going on for you’). Example e) – if uttered by a client – would be reframed by the mediator by describing Barry’s behaviour and something like ‘you feel that that’s bullying’. Three examples of mediator language are given below, but there are others in the interview:‘Can you tell me how you feel?’‘This seems a shared experience’‘We came here on the understanding that both of you were going to have a chance to speak to one another, Janet, you’re not letting James speak, I want to check with each of you, are you still here to help each other to speak and listen? [Clients: yes, yes] Okay, in that case, Janet, it’s your turn to be quiet. James, away you go.’ Expression of interpersonal meaning:Speaker roles and relative social status: The mediator has the highest status in the interaction and is responsible for the nature of the whole conversation. The mediator sometimes downplays her controlling role and presents herself as sharing equal status; however, at other times she asserts her authority. Katherine offers clues to this when she comments: ‘you need to stop people who are raising their voice or going off-track.’ She even seeks to direct the language that clients use: ‘you might quite explicitly tell them to use “I statements” not “You statements”’.Social distance: The mediator seeks to reduce social distance, creating a sense of informality. Katherine explains that she consciously uses language that will reduce social distance – ‘ordinary language’ – which helps clients to think of her as an ‘ordinary’ person.Speaker positioning: The mediator clearly invites the responses and thoughts of others, presenting herself as happy to be corrected and steered by clients, ‘because you want them to feel that they can correct you, you want them to give you the steer and for them to end up saying what it is that they’re feeling or believing.’ However, at times she positions herself as relatively sure of her views. Social role, social distance and speaker positioning are part of the interpersonal function within Michael Halliday’s theory of language known as systemic functional linguistics or SFL (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2013) – which you first encountered in Week 3. Activity 3 The language of interpersonal meaning Allow about 10 minutes In this activity you’ll look further at the three following aspects of interpersonal meaning: speaker roles and relative social status social distance speaker positioning. The partially completed table below lists some aspects of the lexicogrammar – the words or ‘lexis’ and grammar – associated with these three aspects of interpersonal meaning. For example, social roles and status may be indicated by who in an interaction has control of topic choice or speaker turn. In the audio clip, Katherine describes and gives examples of mediator language that illustrates these different lexicogrammatical expressions of different dimensions of the interpersonal. In your own notes, reproduce the table and, in the right-hand column, make a note of the descriptions and language examples given by Katherine that correspond to these different areas of lexicogrammar. The first row has been completed as a guide. You may wish to listen to the audio clip again to help you complete the table.

Speaker roles and relative social status:	Descriptions and language examples
Control of topic choice	[Example] OK, let’s crack on … we’ve got a heck of a lot to get through.[Description] You might ask them to say something positive about each other.[Description] Sometimes, you need to stop people who are … going off-track ...
Control of turn management (who can decide which participant speaks and when)
Reformulation (by mediator)
Control over language choices of others
Social distance:
Choice of colloquial language
Choice of personal pronouns (such as I, you, he, she, we)
First name terms (or use of ‘given name’)
Speaker positioning:
Use of tentative language
Occasionally, use of bare assertions – statements which are baldly given with no softening or hedging

Below are some examples of what you might have included.

Speaker roles and relative social status:
Control of topic choice	[Example] OK, let’s crack on … we’ve got a heck of a lot to get through.[Description] You might ask them to say something positive about each other.[Description] Sometimes, you need to stop people who are … going off-track ...
Control of turn management	[Example] Janet, it’s your turn to be quiet, James, away you go.
Reformulation (by mediator)	[Example] I feel you’re being unreasonable becomes you think they’re being unreasonable.
Control over language choices of others	[Description] You might quite explicitly tell them to use ‘I statements’ not ‘You statements’.
Social distance:
Choice of colloquial language	[Example] Let’s crack on … we’ve got a heck of a lot to get through.[Description] really homely phrases ... not a special, technical user of grandiose language.
Choice of personal pronouns	[Example] We came here… You both…[Description] You’re using language to indicate the connection that they should have or that they’re aspiring to have.[Description] Using we, a lot, rather than I or you
First name terms	[Example] Janet, James
Speaker positioning:
Use of tentative language	[Example] I’m wondering what/if, Am I right in [thinking that]..?; It sounds like/as though.[Example] This seems a …
Occasionally, use of bare assertions	[Example] We came here on the understanding that…’[Example] Janet, you’re not letting James speak’

This analysis suggests that the mediator is very much responsible for the tone of the session, and so for ensuring that interpersonal meanings are deployed in helpful ways throughout. The mediator projects an open, tentative positioning for herself, creating a sense that all the participants are ‘in it together’. Despite this impression, there are clear differences in mediator/client roles: the mediator seems to have control over topic choice, turn management and even influences the language the clients themselves use, within certain understood ‘rules’ of interaction. One way in which this is achieved is through what linguists call reformulation – referred to in the audio clip as ‘reframing’. In the mediation, clients can and do express attitudes and make evaluations, but the mediator puts them – and is allowed to put them – into different words. This indicates a clear asymmetry between the roles and status of the mediator and the client, in which the professional is in control, and this is a common feature of professional talk studied by linguists. One aspect of lexicogrammar that is not listed in the table but is associated with the construal of interpersonal meanings is the distribution of speech functions within an interaction. Here we do not have an entire interaction to analyse, so it is harder to comment on this aspect of the language use. What we can say is that the mediator seems to employ a range of techniques that deploy different status relationships at different points in the mediation, in ways that are not equally available to everyone in the room. For example, at times Katherine describes consciously using questioning to invite clients to say what they are thinking or feeling. Although she tends to use ‘I statements’ herself, rather than ‘you statements’, in the same way that clients are encouraged to do, sometimes the mediator is able to shift to the ‘you statement’, for example ‘you think they’re being unreasonable’. Participants in the interaction are on ‘first name terms’ all round – which might indicate equal status. However, when the need arises, first names are deployed in a more asymmetrical way, for example probably only the mediator uses the wording ‘First name + imperative clause’ as in ‘James, away you go’. Equally, although Katherine aims to use ‘open and tentative’ language, at times she also uses bare assertions, ‘Janet, it’s your turn to be quiet’ (a statement that almost functions as a command). It’s therefore possible to see how the professional mediator is shaping the context of the mediation from moment to moment through the skilled manipulation of lexicogrammatical choice. You may have noticed language use in commercial contexts in which there is a deliberate manipulation of language, for example in mass media advertising, or in the context of sales talk, in order to create a sense of individual, personal connection with the target audience or reader. One term used to describe this technique is synthetic personalisation (Fairclough, 1989). An issue raised by the informal language use in the discussion of mediation so far is the question of whether there is an element of synthetic personalisation. To what extent do you think the familiarity and interactivity of mediation language is either genuine or artificially manufactured in order to achieve a particular purpose? Katherine refers to as ‘fluffy phrases at the beginning of sentences’, such as ‘I’m wondering what/if’, ‘Am I right in [thinking that] … ?’, ‘It sounds like/as though’. These sentence starters are linguistic resources used to hedge or soften the statement which follows, serving a range of functions, as you’ll explore in the next activity. Activity 4 Direct and indirect statements Allow about 10 minutes Try to describe in linguistic terms what is happening in each of the types of ‘fluffy phrases’ quoted above. How might they have sounded if expressed more directly, and what do you think would be the impact of the shift in expression? ‘Am I right in thinking that you’re getting angry?’ ‘I’m wondering if you’re getting angry.’ ‘It sounds as though you’re getting angry.’ ‘Am I right in thinking that you’re getting angry?’ asks a question in order to state an opinion. ‘I’m wondering if you’re getting angry’ makes the speaker more prominent, foregrounding the speaker’s mental processes (the thinking/reflecting expressed through ‘I’m wondering’) over the addressee’s feelings. ‘It sounds as though you’re getting angry’ takes away the addressee’s personal agency altogether. A more direct expression of all of these might have been ‘I think you’re getting angry’ or simply ‘You’re getting angry’, which would probably be experienced by the addressee as more threatening or combative. In the next activity you’ll shift attention from the manipulation of interpersonal meaning to the question of how different ways of viewing the world are represented. In mediation, the ‘world’ in question is made up of the past and present relationships between the parties, their perceptions of the other and the stories that both have to tell about the other. One of the tasks of the mediator is to encourage the parties to slightly change their view of the situation and of the other person. In the next activity you’ll look at how different utterances may act to provide for different ways of looking at, and thinking about, a particular area of human activity. Activity 5 Establishing meanings Allow about 20 minutes Compare in more detail the following pairs of utterances, which are contrasted by Katherine Graham in the interview. The first represents two alternative wordings that a mediator could use. The second represents a client’s wording and a suggested reformulation by the mediator. What do you notice about the types of words used and the differences between the two utterances in each case? Pair 1A ‘You seem distracted.’B ‘I notice that you’re rocking on your chair and looking out of the window.’ Pair 2A ‘He’s an absolute bully, if he moves the papers on my desk one more time I’m going to make a complaint.’B ‘It sounds as though your desk is a very private space for you and you have a really strong reaction when Barry goes up, touches things on your desk and for you, [you know] you feel that that’s bullying.’ Pair 1: It’s clear that in her alternative phrasing in utterance B, Katherine is using present tense verbs which describe what the client is doing at the time (‘are rocking, [are] looking’). These choices reflect Katherine’s desire to work with ‘what’s happening in the room at the time’. This concern with the ‘here and now’ is also reflected in the use of description which refers to the physical space, ‘on your chair, out of the window’. The mediator also therefore avoids appearing to make judgements or to attribute qualities to others in the room (as in utterance A), helping to maintain a stance of neutrality – what Katherine calls ‘descriptive’ rather than ‘evaluative’ language. Another thing she does in her reformulation is to use ‘I notice’ at the start of the utterance to clearly represent her construction of the situation as a personal impression (perhaps even more than the use of ‘seem’ in the first example). Pair 2: Here utterance B makes a similar use of a mental process (‘sounds as though’) to present what follows as a subjective impression, and so contributing to an open stance on the part of the mediator, inviting a response. Another interesting feature to note here is the repetition of the phrase ‘for you’. This arguably emphasises the subjective nature of the client’s reaction to Barry’s behaviour. At the same time the wording ‘when Barry goes up, touches things on your desk’ represents Barry’s behaviour in very concrete terms, thus lending credibility to the person’s experience. This contrasts with the bare assertion about Barry’s attributes: ‘He’s an absolute bully.’ In this week you’ve seen how an awareness of language use can assist in the role of the mediator. Katherine Graham is clear, however, that there is no clear-cut guide for the language of mediation: ‘When you train people [mediators], they’re always wanting a phrasebook and they’re very frustrated that you’re not going to give them one because the key skill is to be alive and creative in each conversation in each moment of each conversation.’ In a mediation, the professionals have to think on their feet, and use ‘what the parties bring’. If you’d like to read more about the role of a mediator, you could start with the following two websites, which look at workplace mediators and family mediators respectively: ACAS (2022) Mediation at work: What mediation is and how it can help. Available at: https://www.acas.org.uk/mediation. National Careers Service, Family mediator. Available at: https://nationalcareers.service.gov.uk/job-profiles/family-mediator. Austin, J.L. (1962) How To Do Things with Words, Oxford, Clarendon. Barattin, M. and Latusi, S. (2025) ‘The role of tone of voice in tourism destination brands’ social media communication’, Tourism Review (Association Internationale d’experts Scientifiques Du Tourisme). Available at: https://www.emerald.com/tr/article/doi/10.1108/TR-09-2024-0800/1257529/The-role-of-tone-of-voice-in-tourism-destination (Accessed: 30 March 2026). Biber, D. (1988) Variation Across Speech and Writing, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Culpeper, J. (2001) Language and Characterisation: People in Plays and Other Texts, Edinburgh, Pearson Education Limited. de Chernatony, L. (2009) ‘Towards the holy grail of defining “brand”’, Marketing Theory, 9(1), pp. 101–5. Delin, J. (2005) ‘Brand tone of voice: a linguistic analysis of brand positions’, Journal of Applied Linguistics, 2(1), pp. 1–44. Larsen, F. (2023) Commodity Branding: A Qualitative Research Approach to Understanding Modern Energy Brands, 1st edn, Springer Nature Switzerland. Available at: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-29966-7 (Accessed: 30 March 2026). Murcia Bielsa, S. (2006) ‘SFL and language branding’ in Knox, J.S. (ed.) To Boldly Proceed, papers from the 39th International Systemic Functional Congress, Sydney, pp. 147–52. Simmons, J. (2006) The Invisible Grail: How Brands can use Words to Engage with Audiences, London, Cyan Communications Limited. Swaminathan, V., Sorescu, A., Steenkamp, J.-B. E. M., O’Guinn, T. C. G. and Schmitt, B. (2020) ‘Branding in a hyperconnected world: refocusing theories and rethinking boundaries, Journal of Marketing, 84(2), pp. 24–46. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022242919899905 (Accessed: 30 March 2026). Anthony, L. (2022) AntConc software (version 4.1.0) [computer software], Tokyo, Waseda University. Available from http://www.laurenceanthony.net/ (Accessed: 16 March 2026). Charles, M. (2014) ‘Getting the corpus habit: EAP students’ long-term use of personal corpora’, English for Specific Purposes, 35, pp. 35–40. Ereaut, G. (2013) ‘How language reveals barriers to success’, Market Leader, 35(1), pp. 34–6. Halliday, M.A.K. and Matthiessen, C. (2004) An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 3rd edn, London, Hodder Education. Mullins, L.J. (2005) Management and Organizational Behaviour, 7th edn, Edinburgh, Prentice Hall. Schein, E.H.  (2016) Organizational Culture and Leadership, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. Available at: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/open/detail.action?docID=4766585 (Accessed: 30 March 2026). Tadesse Bogale, A. and Debela, K.L. (2024) ‘Organizational culture: a systematic review’, Cogent Business & Management, 11(1). Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311975.2024.2340129 (Accessed: 30 March 2026). Van Leeuwen, T. (2008) Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Byrne, P. and Long, B. (1976) Doctors Talking to Patients, London, DHSS. Calgary-Cambridge Guide (2015) Calgary-Cambridge Guide to the Medical Interview – Communication Process. Harvey, K. and Koteyko, N. (2013) Exploring Health Communication: Language in Action, London, Routledge. Laymouna, M., Ma, Y., Lessard, D., Schuster, T., Engler, K. and Lebouché, B. (2024) ‘Roles, Users, Benefits, and Limitations of Chatbots in Health Care: Rapid Review’, Journal of Medical Internet Research, 26(11). ten Have, P. (1989) ‘The consultation as a genre’ in Torode, B. (ed.) Text and Talk as Social Practice, Dordrecht (NL) and Providence (RI), Foris Publications. Newcastle University (2016) Building Early Sentences Therapy. Available at: https://research.ncl.ac.uk/best/ (Accessed: 30 March 2026). Pert, S. (2023) Working with children experiencing speech and language disorders in a bilingual context: a home language approach, first edn, London, Routledge.  ACAS (2022) Mediation at work: What mediation is and how it can help. Available at: https://www.acas.org.uk/mediation (Accessed: 30 March 2026). Benjamin, R. (1990) ‘The physics of mediation: the reflections of scientific theory in professional mediation practice’, Mediation Quarterly, 8(2), pp. 91–113. Fairclough, N. (1989) Language and Power, London, Routledge. Ferguson, L., MacLulich, C. and Ravelli, L. (1995) Meanings and Messages: Language Guidelines for Museum Exhibitions, Sydney, Australian Museum. Greatbatch, J. and Dingwall, T. (1999) ‘Professional neutralism and family mediation’ in Sarangi, S. and Roberts, C. (eds) Talk, Work and Institutional Order: Discourse in Medical, Mediation and Management Settings, Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 271–92. Halliday, M.A.K. and M.M.I.M (2013) Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar, fourth edn, London, Routledge. Kokoeva, L.T., Garunova, N.N., Gurkina, D.A., Slepenok, Y.N. and Stepanova, L.P. (2022) ‘Mediation as a Way to Resolve Conflicts’, in Popkova, E.G. (ed.) Business 4.0 as a Subject of the Digital Economy. Advances in Science, Technology & Innovation, Springer, Cham. Available at: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-90324-4_143 (Accessed: 30 March 2026). Martin, J.R., Zappavigna, M., Dwyer, P. and Cléirigh, C. (2013) ‘Users in uses of language: embodied identity in Youth Justice Conferencing’, Text & Talk, 33(4–5), pp. 467–96. National Careers Service (n.d.) Family mediator. Available at: https://nationalcareers.service.gov.uk/job-profiles/family-mediator (Accessed: 30 March 2026). Stokoe, E. (2014) ‘From talk to text: using the “Conversation Analytic Role-play Method” to engage (potential) mediation clients in spoken and written communication’, Language in Conflict. Available at http://www.languageinconflict.org (Accessed: 30 March 2026). This week was written by Zsófia Demjén and adapted for OpenLearn by Maria Leedham. Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence. The material acknowledged below (and/or referenced in the course) is Proprietary and used under licence (not subject to Creative Commons Licence). Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this free course: Week 1 Images Course image: FatCamera/Getty Images Slideshow of logos/brands: WWF: https://www.wwf.org.uk/; Ferrari: https://www.ferrari.com/en-GB; Adidas: https://www.adidas-group.com/en/; McDonalds: https://www.mcdonalds.com/gb/en-gb.html; Ikea: https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/; BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/; Disney: https://www.disney.co.uk/; YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ Innocent drink packages and back of an Innocent Smoothie carton: courtesy: Innocent Drinks: https://www.innocentdrinks.co.uk Audio Activity 2 audio: ©The Open University 2015 Week 2 Images Word cloud: Created by The Open University using https://www.freewordcloudgenerator.com/generatewordcloud Photograph of a classroom: ©The Open University Figure 1: A screenshot of AntConc software in use: https://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/antconc/ Video Activity 2 video: © The Open University 2015 Activity 3 video: © The Open University 2016 Activity 4 video: © The Open University 2016 Week 3 Text Activity 8: quotation from Ereaut, G. (2013) ‘How language reveals barrier to success’, Market Leader, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 34–6. Images Group of colleagues in a work environment: Jacob Wackerhausen/Getty Images Lily pond: courtesy © Peter Schein Figure 1: Screenshot from Prostate Cancer UK in 2011: https://prostatecanceruk.org/ Audio Activities 3, 5, 7 audios: © The Open University 2015 Week 4 Images Figure 1: gchutka/Getty Images Week 5 Images Figure 1: A speech and language specialist at work: FatCamera/Getty Images Figure 2: Building Early Sentences: https://research.ncl.ac.uk/best/ Figure 3: An SLT works one-to-one with a young child: AMELIE-BENOIST/BSIP/Alamy Audio Activity 1 audio: © The Open University 2015 Activity 2 audio: © The Open University 2015 Activity 4 audio: © The Open University 2015 Week 6 Images Figure 1: shorrocks/Getty Images Audio Activity 1 audio: © The Open University 2015 Every effort has been made to contact copyright owners. 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