Language, Corpus and Empowerment Applications to deaf education, healthcare and online discourses Routledge Applied Corpus Linguistics Series

Language, Corpus and Empowerment applies a novel corpus-driven approach to the exploration of the concept of empowerment in healthcare. The book proposes an innovative corpus-based methodology for finding evidence of empowerment in language use, using data from a video intervention delivered to families of deaf children, as well as assessing the effects of the intervention on the family.

Language, Corpus and Empowerment

• provides a working definition of empowerment which incorporates concepts from linguistics and learning theory;



• uses corpus analysis to provide evidence of how video interventions can transform people?s perspectives;



• examines this new methodology as a potential tool for analysing conversational data longitudinally and at a case-by-case level;



• demonstrates how a corpus-based methodological approach can be applied in conjunction with other language-based approaches, such as discourse analysis and conversation analysis, to explore the ways in which complex social processes occur in interaction;



• makes a valuable development in the assessment of the impact of healthcare interventions and the language of empowerment.

Insightful and ground-breaking, Language, Corpus and Empowerment is essential reading for anyone undertaking research within corpus linguistics.

Introduction

Chapter 1 Defining empowerment and finding evidence of it in language

Chapter 2 Assessing interventions for families of hearing impaired children

Chapter 3 Assessing the VIG intervention for evidence of empowerment

Chapter 4 Observations: Indicators of empowerment from the VIG intervention

Chapter 5 Further application of the empowerment model

Chapter 6 Discussion and concluding remarks

Appendices

Index

Luke Collins is a researcher with the Centre for Research in Applied Linguistics (CRAL) at the University of Nottingham.