ORCID Profile
0000-0002-9697-5747
Current Organisation
University of Wollongong
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Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Date: 13-07-2021
Abstract: Linguistics has embraced the functional and contextual turn but, when building tools for systematic contextual description, we have not made as much use as we could of our own functional traditions. Rather, we have largely relied on the metaphors of law and rule, which do not adequately capture tensions between consistency and variability in how language and context relate to each other. Our aim in this paper is to show the economy and practicality of representing context as a pathway through a network, drawing on the network technique for mapping systems of grammatical choice introduced by Michael Halliday, and on its application to other linguistic strata first offered by Ruqaiya Hasan. The paper begins by outlining why alternative frameworks are needed for describing context-language relations. We then present a contextual network for one specific domain of the Systemic Functional Linguistic notion of Tenor, namely social distance , and use this to explore how different configurations of features of social distance influence the way that traditions of practice are passed on as a specialised legacy in two different professional collaborations. While the kind of context modelling discussed here is in a very early phase of development compared to phonetic, morphological and grammatical description, it has many advantages: contextual networks are paradigmatic in orientation they help display and theorise metastability in language they are “ad hoc” in Firth’s positive sense and they constitute a proposal to be tested against observed behaviour within specific cultural and situational settings.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 02-2022
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 2004
DOI: 10.1016/S0277-9536(03)00204-1
Abstract: Randomised clinical trials have come to be regarded as the gold standard in treatment evaluation. However, many doctors see the discussion of a clinical trial as an intrusion into the doctor-patient relationship and find these discussions difficult to initiate. Detailed informed consent is now a requirement of patient participation in trials however, it is known that patients commonly fail to understand and recall the information conveyed. These difficulties for doctors and patients raise questions about the ethical integrity of the informed consent process. In this study, we have developed a set of communication strategies underpinned by ethical, linguistic and psychological theory, designed to assist doctors in this difficult task. Initially, audiotape transcripts of 26 consultations in which 10 medical oncologists invited patients to participate in clinical trials were analysed by expert ethicists, linguists, oncologists and psychologists, using rigorous qualitative methodology. A subset of seven of these was subjected to detailed linguistic analysis. A strategies document was developed to address themes which emerged from these analyses. This document was presented to relevant expert stakeholders. Their feedback was incorporated into the final document. Four themes emerged from the analysis (a) shared decision-making, (b) the sequence of moves in the consultation, (c) the type and clarity of the information provided and (d) disclosure of controversial information and coercion. Detailed strategies were developed to assist doctors to communicate in these areas. We have developed a set of ethical strategies which may assist health professionals in this difficult area. A training package based on these strategies is currently being evaluated in a multi-centre randomised controlled trial.
Publisher: BMJ
Date: 11-2020
DOI: 10.1136/BMJOPEN-2020-039503
Abstract: Evidence regarding effective communication between clinicians and patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is limited. Studies that investigate clinical communication in IBD are much fewer in number than studies that investigate the perceptions of patients and clinicians about communication in clinical encounters. The current review aims to identify, organise and summarise systematically what is currently known about (1) the characteristics of interactions between clinicians who manage IBD and patients with IBD, and (2) how clinical discussion affects health outcomes in IBD. Scopus, PubMed, Embase, Communication Abstracts, Health & Society, Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts and PsycINFO will be systematically searched for studies that investigate the characteristics of IBD clinical interactions during recorded consultations, from earliest available dates within each database to May 2020. A specifically developed quality assessment tool, grounded in linguistic theory, will be used to critically assess the evidence. In addition, a data extraction template will be developed and utilised to provide a description of the characteristics of IBD clinical communication as well as an estimation of its effect on health outcomes in a narrative synthesis. Ethical review and approval is not required for this systematic review as no primary data will be collected. The results will be published in peer-reviewed journals and presented at academic conferences. International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews (PROSPERO) on 28 April 2020 (registration number: CRD42020169657).
Publisher: Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience
Date: 10-2022
DOI: 10.47389/37.4.104
Abstract: Modern society is becoming increasingly dependent on social media for communication and information access and its role in disaster management cannot be overlooked. #RecoverSouthCoast is a research project that analysed data from Twitter and conducted interviews to understand the ways in which social media supported (or hindered) recovery following the summer bushfires on the south coast of New South Wales in 2019–20. This paper examines #RecoverSouthCoast findings from a Twitter content analysis. The results revealed that Twitter use can support bushfire recovery in erse ways, including post-disaster reconstruction and infrastructure services, donations and financial support, mental health and emotional support, environmental health, business and economic activities, animal welfare, information support, solidarity and social cohesion and insurance claims. These findings are important because they strengthen evidence to support policy and investment in tools and social media capabilities within organisations involved in disaster response and recovery. Interestingly, some challenges to the effective use of Twitter during the recovery process were also identified. The paper provides recommendations for emergency management practice in Australia.
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH
Date: 08-2023
Abstract: This study explored the variation in emerging adults’ communication with gastroenterologists around the management of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Nineteen emerging adults with IBD aged 18–25 and seven gastroenterologists participated in the study. Outpatient specialist consultations of consenting participants were audio-recorded and transcribed. Transcribed consultations were analysed in terms of the linguistic structure of the consultations and the gastroenterologist-patient role relationship. Variations in the emerging adults’ communication with their gastroenterologists stem partly from variation in their ability, opportunity, or need to contribute to the different phases of the consultation and partly from variations in the gastroenterologists’ style of communication. Gastroenterologists differed in the construction of their role relationship with the patient, resulting in variations in employing empowering strategies including eliciting, exploring, and clarifying the patient’s concerns, sharing clinical reasoning, and validating the patient experience. Variations were also observed in the length of appointments and the gastroenterologists’ assessment and addressing of adherence issues. Techniques used by the gastroenterologist varied (1) from simply confirming adherence, to a comprehensive assessment of the patient’s understanding of their management plan and their feedback, and (2) from use of persuasion to values calibration. Evidence-based consumer interventions and communication guidelines for clinicians are needed to address the identified variations in providing care to emerging adults living with chronic conditions.
Publisher: Equinox Publishing
Date: 06-05-2011
DOI: 10.1558/LHS.V4I2.187
Abstract: Halliday’s description of register as ‘a variety of language, corresponding to a variety of situation’, with situation interpreted ‘by means of a conceptual framework using the terms “field”, “tenor” and “mode”’ (Halliday, 1985/89: 29, 38) is revisited to reflect on the theoretical work the term ‘register’ does within the SFL paradigm. In doing so, we recognise that the concepts of a linguistic theory are ‘ineffable’ (Halliday 2002[1988]) i.e. that ‘providing definitions of a theoretical term... requires that it be positioned vis-à-vis other concepts in the theory’ (Hasan, 2004: 16). It follows that changing the position of ‘register’ in the theory changes the nature of the concept. So while alternative uses of the term ‘register’ – such as in Martin’s genre model (e.g. 1992) and Halliday’s model – may advance a shared program for language description and explanation as a route to social change, they must be seen as more than terminological variants. One consequence of the productivity of Martin’s approach has been that the Hallidayan line of register theory has not had sufficient critical explication. This paper therefore begins with a brief review of the register concept. It then exemplifies the term, as postulated by Halliday, with a registerial analysis of surgical interaction, drawing on Hasan’s context modelling (e.g. Hasan 1995, 2004, 2009a), and adopting what Matthiessen (1993) calls a ‘metafunctional slice’ with ‘multistratal coverage’. By accounting for choice at different strata, we seek to ‘relate wording to context via meaning which acts as the interface between the two’ (Hasan 2009a: 182).
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Date: 29-01-2020
Abstract: Halliday ( 1978 : 111) defines register as “the configuration of semantic resources that the member of a culture typically associates with a situation type.” Elsewhere, however, he stresses that when we talk of “a register” this is a term of convenience: register is more properly theorised as continuous variation along many linguistic dimensions. In this paper I review progress in our capacity to describe register and context of situation and ask whether the tension between discrete and continuous models of register might hinder such progress. I then consider Hasan’s ( 1983 , 2013 ) contextually-open networked model of message semantics, arguing that in conjunction with context networks it has potential to map register variation but still needs to be tested across a large and varied set of domains. Ex les from healthcare interaction ground the discussion.
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Date: 29-09-2022
Abstract: This paper explores how emotion is conveyed in spoken language based on a s le of three stories for children read aloud by a trained storyteller. It draws on both Martin & White’s appraisal framework ( 2005 ) and a systematic account of vocal features. Interpreting and profiling emotion is a challenge both for researchers interested in spoken language and for English-as-an-additional-language teachers, when working to improve students’ spoken expression of emotion. Underpinning this challenge is the absence of a unified theoretical stance and a consequent lack of shared analytical tools for describing how speakers use semiotic resources to convey emotion in their speech. A systemic functional semiotic approach can make visible the co-patterning of wordings and vocalisations that express emotion.
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Date: 29-01-2020
Abstract: This paper explores one aspect of the operationalisation of a patient-centred ideology of care by examining an oncologist’s answers to questions asked by her patient and his companion during a palliative oncology consultation and comparing her answers to the markedly different answers of another oncologist. Halliday’s concept of register and Hasan’s semantic networks are used to examine the oncologists’ answers. Patients’ questions create the semiotic environment for clinicians to provide the information patients need for informed decision-making – an important aspect of patient-centredness. The answers clinicians provide construe their position towards this ideology of care. Findings suggest that one way patient-centredness can be operationalised, at the level of semantics, is through providing elaborated answers that explicitly display the reasoning employed by the oncologist.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 12-09-2006
DOI: 10.1007/S10897-006-9023-X
Abstract: The literature on risk perception in women from high-risk breast cancer families reveals persistent over-estimation of risk, even after counseling. In this study, a communication aid was designed to facilitate discussion of risk between clinical geneticists and genetic counselors and women from this high-risk population. Stage 1. The aid was developed by an expert panel of clinical geneticists, genetic counselors, psychologists, an epidemiologist, an oncologist, linguists and a consumer. It was guided by the international literature on risk communication and a large multi-centre Australian study of risk communication. The 13 page full-color communication aid used varying formats of words, numbers, graphs and pie-charts to address (a) the woman's subjective risk (b) the population risk of breast cancer c) the risk of inherited breast cancer (d) the cumulative risk for women with BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations (e) family risk factors (f) the woman's suitability for genetic testing (h) screening and management recommendations, and (i) a re-assessment of the woman's subjective risk. Stage 2: A before-after pilot study of 38 women who were unaffected with breast cancer and were attending four Australian familial cancer clinics was undertaken. Baseline and follow-up questionnaires were completed by 27 women. Outcomes were compared to those observed in 107 similar women undergoing genetic counseling without the communication aid in 2001. The risk communication aid appears to be beneficial breast cancer genetics knowledge improved in some areas and importantly, risk perceptions improved in the cohort receiving the communication aid. Psychological measures showed no difference in anxiety or depression between the group receiving the communication aid and the comparison cohort. Women and clinicians were very positive about the usefulness of the communication aid as an adjunct to the genetic counseling consultation.
Publisher: AMPCo
Date: 06-2007
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2016
Publisher: Equinox Publishing
Date: 14-03-2008
DOI: 10.1558/LHS.V2I2.205
Abstract: This paper turns genre modelling to the task of exploring critical variation between instances of an emerging genre – the workers’ compensation teleconference. It attempts to tease out the role that such variation plays in the success of that genre in terms of the social process that it was designed to realize, noting however that ‘success’ must be viewed from multiple perspectives. We describe and illustrate a Hasanian GSP approach to genre description, based on collaborative research we undertook with the NSW Workers Compensation Commission (WCC) in Australia. The method proved useful for identifying what kinds of discourse strategies contribute to the successful resolution of disputes at teleconference, and we present preliminary findings which suggest an association between resolution and what we have called the ‘Orient to Process’ phase in the generic structure of these teleconferences, using a semantic network to display the crucial variation within this phase. We also address some pragmatic consequences of training arbitrators to use ‘successful’ discourse strategies in relation to issues of equity for the worker, and some theoretical consequences of adjusting the GSP framework for research on professional discourses.
Publisher: MDPI
Date: 26-10-2018
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 09-04-2018
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2016
Publisher: BMJ
Date: 08-2021
DOI: 10.1136/BMJOPEN-2021-051053
Abstract: This systematic review aims to investigate what is currently known about the characteristics of interactions between patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and their clinicians and its effect on patient outcomes. Scopus, PubMed, Embase, Communication Abstracts, Health & Society, Linguistics and Language Behaviour Abstracts and PsycINFO were systematically searched from inception to June 2021. Peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters in English investigating the characteristics of naturally occurring interactions between clinicians that manage IBD and patients with IBD during recorded consultations were included. Risk of bias was assessed using a specifically developed quality assessment tool, grounded in linguistic theory and the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool. A narrative synthesis guided by the linguistic concept of metafunction was performed to synthesise the findings. Of the 2883 abstracts reviewed five formed the basis of the review. Interactions between IBD nurses and patients have been mostly characterised in terms of information provision regarding prescribed medications without consideration of the interpersonal aspect. Discussing online medical information with nurses has been shown to improve patient satisfaction. Analyses of gastroenterologist–patient interactions have concentrated on the clinical relationship which has been shown to be disease-centred. Shared decision making in ulcerative colitis has been shown to be compromised due to lack of transparency regarding treatment goals. This review did not include articles in languages other than English. Cumulative evidence could not be produced due to the small number of included studies and the ersity of contexts, theories and data types. There is a paucity of systematic research on naturally occurring clinical communication in IBD and its effect on outcomes. Further research needs to be done to address this knowledge gap. CRD42020169657.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 08-10-2022
DOI: 10.1038/S41598-022-21265-6
Abstract: Social media platforms have proved to be vital sources of information to support disaster response and recovery. A key issue, though, is that social media conversation about disasters tends to tail off after the immediate disaster response phase, potentially limiting the extent to which social media can be relied on to support recovery. This situation motivates the present study of social media usage patterns, including who contributes to social media around disaster recovery, which recovery activities they contribute to, and how well that participation is sustained over time. Utilising Twitter data from the 2019–20 Australian bushfires, we statistically examined the participation of different groups (citizens, emergency agencies, politicians and others) across categories of disaster recovery activity such as donations & financial support or mental health & emotional support, and observed variations over time. The results showed that user groups differed in how much they contributed on Twitter around different recovery activities, and their levels of participation varied with time. Recovery-related topics also varied significantly with time. These findings are valuable because they increase our understanding of which aspects of disaster recovery currently benefit most from social media and which are relatively neglected, indicating where to focus resources and recovery effort.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 04-2023
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2016
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
Date: 23-09-2022
DOI: 10.3389/FPSYG.2022.992785
Abstract: Tom Andersen’s reflecting team process, which allowed families to witness and respond to the talk of professionals during therapy sessions, has been described as revolutionary in the field of family therapy. Reflecting teams are prominent in a number of family therapy approaches, more recently in narrative and dialogical therapies. This way of working is considered more a philosophy than a technique, and has been received positively by both therapists and service users. This paper describes how dialogical therapists conceptualise the reflective process, how they work to engage families in reflective dialogues and how this supports change. We conducted semi-structured, reflective interviews with 12 dialogical therapists with between 2 and 20 years of experience. Interpretative Phenomenological analysis of transcribed interviews identified varying conceptualisations of the reflecting process and descriptions of therapist actions that support reflective talk among network members. We adopted a dialogical approach to interpretation of this data. In this sense, we did not aim to condense accounts into consensus but instead to describe variations and new ways of understanding dialogical reflecting team practices. Four themes were identified: Lived experience as expertise Listening to the self and hearing others Relational responsiveness and fostering connection and Opening space for something new. We applied these themes to psychotherapy process literature both within family therapy literature and more broadly to understand more about how reflecting teams promote helpful and healing conversations in practice.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Date: 19-12-2012
Publisher: Equinox Publishing
Date: 14-06-2010
DOI: 10.1558/LHS.V3I3.263
Abstract: While cohesive devices do not in themselves, or in their aggregate, correspond to the degree of coherence in a text, the measure of "cohesive harmony" developed by Hasan (1984) does constitute an index of the 'textness' of extended discourse, including interactive exchanges. A team of functional linguists and psychiatrists investigated the discourse correlates of techniques in the Conversational Model of Psychotherapy (following Meares, 1993, 2005). As one dimension of this investigation, the "fragmented" discourse of dissociating patients was analysed for cohesive harmony. This analysis provided a basis for discriminating degrees of fragmentation in the discourse of patients interacting with therapists, and results help explain the paradoxical combination of disaggregation and fusion in the way such patients construe their experience. Additionally, the method provides new forms of evidence of coherence and consensus between therapist and patient, indices of progress which might otherwise be 'lost' or argued on an intuitive basis alone. Halliday, M. A. K., & Hasan, R. (Eds.). (1985). Language, context, and text: Aspects of language in a social semiotic perspective. Deakin University: Deakin University Press. Hasan, R. (1984). Coherence and Cohesive Harmony. In J. Flood (Ed.), Understanding Reading Comprehension: Cognition, language, and the structure of prose (pp. 181-219). Newark, Delaware: International Reading Association. Meares, R. (1993). The Metaphor of Play: Disruption and Restoration in the Borderline Experience. Northvale, NJ: Aronson. Meares, R. (2005). The Metaphor of Play: Origin and Breakdown of Personal Being (3rd, revised ed.). London: Routledge.
Publisher: Equinox Publishing
Date: 14-04-2014
DOI: 10.1558/LHS.V9I1.59
Abstract: In this paper I test the capacity for functional linguistics, in particular register theory (Halliday 2002) and cohesive harmony analysis (Hasan 1984), to illuminate how habitual patterns of language make meat-eating and factory-farming seem natural, and how certain counter-discourses work to expose the seams in such practices. My primary ex le is an award-winning animal welfare c aign based on mock recipe cards. While such genre-bending clearly aims at bypassing reader defenses, the text’s real achievement is to combine semantic features whose co-occurrence is normally blocked by the cultural-linguistic system, allowing it to project a sophisticated food identity for readers and construe a social identity for the recipe ‘ingredients’ (pigs), realized largely through bizarre cohesive harmony. Implications discussed include relations between ‘major and minor identities’ (Lakoff 2006), the mobilization of identity in dominant and emerging ideologies, and the limits on who/what can count as a social subject that might ‘perform’ an identity.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 21-10-2010
DOI: 10.1111/J.1445-2197.2010.05531.X
Abstract: Surgery can be a triumph of co-operation, the procedure evolving as a result of joint action between multiple participants. The communication that mediates the joint action of surgery is conveyed by verbal but particularly by non-verbal signals. Competing priorities superimposed by surgical learning must also be negotiated within this context and this paper draws on techniques of systemic functional linguistics to observe and analyse the flow of information during such a phase of surgery.
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 21-04-2023
Abstract: In the absence of targeted empirical evidence on effective clinical communication in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), a broad overview of existing evidence on effective communication in healthcare and available recommendations for communication in telehealth is provided and mapped onto IBD research and practice. A narrative literature review was conducted using Pubmed and Scopus databases and snowballing literature search. Evidence-based relationship building strategies include communicating emotions, acknowledging and addressing patients’ hesitancy, and ensuring continued support. A particular recommendation regarding telehealth interaction is to avoid long stretches of talk. Effective informational strategies include facilitating and supporting information exchange and considering patients’ preferences in decision-making. In teleconsultations, clinicians should ask direct questions about patients’ emotional state, clarify their understanding of patients’ concerns and check patients’ understanding, address at least one patient-reported outcome when discussing the recommended treatment, and shorten the consultation where possible. Strategies for maximizing effective clinical communication in the spoken communicative mode include using infographics and simple language, and assessing adherence at the beginning of the consultation. For teleconsultations, clinicians are advised to allow patients to explain the reason for their call at the beginning of the teleconsultation, probe additional concerns early and before ending the teleconsultation, and be mindful of technical issues such as voice delays. Use of question prompt lists, decision aids, micro-lessons, and communication training interventions for clinicians could be beneficial in IBD care. Further research into the implementation of such interventions as well as clinical communication concerns specific to IBD is warranted.
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 12-01-2017
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Date: 2005
Abstract: In applying linguistics to the task of analysing how agentivity is construed through verbal interaction, scholars often equate social agency with grammatical agency, and in particular with the grammar of transitivity. The difficulty I want to address in this paper is that we may miss other important, systematic and contrastive patterning in the agentivity with which social actors and other entities are depicted, because such agentivity is realized through a range of dispersed linguistic resources. Systemic Functional Linguistics can provide a useful framework for co-ordinating the contribution of these resources to the overall construal of agency in a text or set of texts. It does this best when it focusses on bringing out the particular stratal alignments that characterise different contexts. The paper draws on a study of treatment decision-making in HIV medicine as an ex le of a social context where choices in the construal of agency make a crucial difference to choices of professional and institutional practice. In this study the construal of agency was taken as a chief source of evidence about whether doctors and patients engage in shared decision-making, and it was also seen as a strategy which doctors and patients can use to open up or close down opportunities for shared decision-making. A key finding was that doctors and patients in HIV medicine often construe the agency of one participant as a resource for the agency of another, rather than construing the agency of one participant • as competing with the agency of the other. In particular, it is where doctors and patients construe each other as semiotic agents that shared decisionmaking seems most likely to occur.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 02-05-2018
DOI: 10.1186/S40554-018-0057-9
Abstract: This paper explores advanced cancer patients’ self-identification from a grammatical-concordance perspective. It combines corpus linguistics tool of concordance and transitivity analysis to investigate the grammatical choices that advanced cancer patients make to identify and construct themselves during an oncology consultation. The data comprises 69 oncology consultations between advanced cancer patients (and in some consultations a companion or companions) and their oncologist. Findings reveal that these advanced cancer patients identified themselves with an active and informed role in terms of self-care, decision-making and other administrative activities they identified their everyday life as an indispensable part of the domain of medicine and they did not associate themselves with emotive mental processes during the consultation.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 23-09-2022
DOI: 10.1007/S10879-022-09568-1
Abstract: Psychological therapies use talk as a means to produce change for in iduals who are experiencing distress. Despite a significant body of research comparing approaches, there is little evidence for the superiority of one model over another. The process of reflection has been suggested as a common factor across modalities, and research aiming to measure this phenomenon is emerging. This scoping review is focussed on the conceptualisations, measurement and process outcomes of reflective talk as it occurs during therapy. Twenty-two studies were selected from a total of 3712 papers identified following a systematic search of SCOPUS, MEDLINE, PsychINFO and Web of Science databases. A variety of descriptors emerged: intrapersonal constructs such as mentalization and metacognition tended to view reflectivity as an in idually acquired skill or trait, where other descriptors adopted an interpersonal understanding of reflection as co-constructed through dialogue. Our findings suggest a shift from in idual to intersubjective understandings of reflecting processes in therapy may be a valuable area for future research.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Date: 30-04-2019
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 2001
Start Date: 2003
End Date: 2003
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 2004
End Date: 2004
Funder: Australian Research Council
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