The Centre for Language, Discourse & Communication

King's College London is a major centre for descriptive and applied linguistics, and to capitalise on this expertise, the College set up the Centre for Language, Discourse & Communication in March 2006.

We do both basic and applied research on language, communication, society and education. Our work is jointly supported by the Schools of Humanities and Social Science & Public Policy, and we are recognized by the Economic and Social Research Council for our research training. We have particular strengths in research on the dynamics of language and literacy within globalisation and intercultural contact, and we focus on language, literacy and discourse in everyday interaction, in education, literature, and popular culture, in new & mass media, and in medical and workplace settings. Particular research areas include:

We work with English, English-based Creoles, Chinese, German, Greek, Spanish, Swedish and a range of minority languages, and we combine linguistics with anthropology, ethnography, history, and psychology, and with quantitative, corpus and discourse analysis. In recent years, we have provided a base for more than a dozen externally funded research projects; we have 20-30 MPhil/PhD students; we occupy a prominent position in national and international research networks; and we hold two research days a year and run a range of seminar series. We also run a number of Master’s programmes that are both research and professionally oriented, as well as a national training programme in linguistic ethnography for researchers across the social sciences (jointly with the Institute of Education, and funded by the ESRC). Our research in discourse analysis, educational, historical, text and sociolinguistics was top-rated in the last Research Assessment Exercise.

The Centre is coordinated by a Management Group consisting of Professor Ben Rampton (Director), Celia Roberts and Dr Jannis Androutsopoulos from the School of Social Science and Public Policy, and Dr Alexandra Georgakopoulou, Dr Horst Simon and Professor Willard McCarty from the School of Humanities. Contract and doctoral researchers are represented by Mel Cooke and Milena Kozic respectively.