Dr Mia Stephens |
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| Position: | Lecturer |
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| Division/Portfolio: | Division of Education, Arts and Social Sciences | |
| School/Unit: | School of Communication | |
| Campus: | Magill Campus | |
| Office: | C2-01 | |
| Telephone: | +61 8 830 24759 | |
| Fax: | +61 8 830 24745 | |
| Email: | Mia_dot_Stephens_at_unisa_dot_edu_dot_au | |
| URL for Business Card: | http://people.unisa.edu.au/Mia.Stephens | |
Joint recipient Prime Minister's Award for Tertiary Teaching 2000
Australian Linguistics Society
http://www.eianz.org/index.cfm?objectid=032DC1DF-65BF-EBC1-22D6F697C5624CAD
Wordwise on Nexus for ABC Asiapacific TV
Teaching interests
- Linguistics- the theory of language, phonology, syntax, morphology, semantics, pragmatics
- The English language
- Contact linguistics - English as an international language, endangered languages,language and power, the English language in Australia
- Historical linguistics - History of the English language
- Communication and media - culture and communication
- Communication Rhetoric and Reasoning
- Global Environmental Politics
- Language and Society
- discourse analysis, conversation and interaction analysis, text and context, pragmatics
- English around the world, English as a global lingua franca, International English
- Professional and Creative communication
I teach the following courses
| COMM 2047 | Language and Context |
| COMM 2055 | Spoken Texts |
| COMM 2062 | The English Language: Past and Future |
| COMM 2051 | Professional And Creative Communication 1 |
| COMM 2052 | Professional And Creative Communication 2 |
| COMM 1043 | Issues in Publication and Design |
Professional associations
Australian Linguistics Society
Applied Linguistics Association of Australia
The Environment Institute of Australia
The Royal Society of South Australia
Qualifications
PhD Linguistics and Environment - Adelaide - A Decent Writer: Professional Environmental Communication Among Professional Environmental Managers
MA Applied Linguistics - Macquarie- LIEM: A Method of Accounting for Meaning in Order to Prepare a Lexicon of the Discourse Concerning the Degradation of the Natural Environment
Graduate Diploma Natural Resources Management- Adelaide
Graduate Diploma Educational Administration
Graduate Diploma Education
BA Honours English language and literature
Research interests
- Linguistics
- Environmental Communication, language and environmental responsibility,ecolinguistics
- pragmatics, conversational analysis and spoken interaction analysis,
- education, including environmental education, language learning and teaching, including TESOL and applied linguistics
- language and society, lexicography and language change
- organisational communication, communities of practice, knowledge management, writing in the workplace.
Research publications
Stephens, M. (2008). How is a truck assembly line like a green roof? Australian Journal of Communication, forthcoming. How does the Ford company communicate environmental responsibility and where does the Rouge truck factory greenroof fit in to this meaning-making? These organisational communication questions arise in a framework of environmental communication in two senses. These are the organisation’s environmental reporting and its communication about the environment. However a third sense leads to more intricate observations about the relation of the organisation with the wider society in meaning-making about environmental responsibility. Linguistic ethnography provided a raft of theoretical positions sourced from conversational analysis and linguistic pragmatics, including Halliday’s framework of field, tenor and mode to examine spoken language fragments in context and to encourage the linking of the tour guide misunderstandings to a paradigm of innovation and efficiency which restored relevance and thereby enabled understanding of the interactions. Ford maps practical ideas for environmental responsibility into a widely accepted paradigm of efficient production, via a trope of freedom and innovation. The greenroof is a text which rests its meaning-making on the implication that environmental problems can be mitigated through innovation to address efficiency. The greenroof is a biological machine in the process line.
Stephens, M 2008 Together on the ropes and the slippery slopes - joint paper authorship and conference attendance with higher degree students , a paper to be presented for a special issue of TEXT: The Journal of Writers and Writing Courses: Supervising the Creative Arts Research Higher Degree: Towards Best Practice Lave and Wenger’s concept of the Community of Practice provides a useful framework to organize a description of initiation into the academic practice of conferences for a higher degree student. Joint authoring and attendance at conferences with higher degree students gives a supervisor more opportunities than just the research rewards, and exposes them to more perils. The experience delivers practice-based learning at a level not attainable in the normal research relationship. Issues that arise include time management, methodology issues, presentation decisions, and production standards. Adjustment to the Community of Practice includes tactical and strategic positioning in terms of conference culture, asking and answering questions, and decisions about which papers to attend. The paper extrudes some principles from a year’s joint conference experiences.
Stephens M and Neill R 2008 You do know it’s only got one bathroom. paper submitted for publication to Memory Studies A house writes its story through an amanuensis. Thus begins another episode in the troubled, complex relationship between literature and history. What starts as a simple interest in aerial photos of an old house, in wine labels pasted into a cupboard, in artefacts recovered in the garden, turns into a biographical project crammed with information from oenologists and viticulturalists who live around the Penfolds vineyards in South Australia. The house begins to speak through these elderly voices, which no longer command the automatic level of community respect they once took for granted. This is where the choices the writer makes become difficult. It requires a method with the flexibility to focus on meanings, on making sense of the artefacts and objects through what the people say. Linguistic ethnography [LE] is developed from varied scholarship investigating language in context, incorporates tools such as Halliday’s concepts of field, tenor and mode (1985) and Scollon’s (2000) Hymesian seven point grammar of context. We use it to provide answers such as where the creative control must lie, to what extent the input is edited, and how to retrieve the deserved level of respect for those whose voices the community no longer hears.
Stephens, M., & Neill, R. (2008). Voices in the vines, Collective Biography conference. Canberra. The suburb of Magill grew around the Penfolds vineyards which produce one of South Australia's favourite wines, Grange Hermitage. Oenologists and viticulturalists, tasters and wine-marketers live next door to newcomers, the university people and city commuters. When one long-term resident tells stories about his life, it is not only one life of oenology which emerges, but the lives of all the other oenologists, then life of the location, and the life of the wine itself. Linguistic ethnography [LE] is the method chosen to capture a range of stories from four generations of winemakers. The method, developed from varied scholarship investigating language in context, incorporating tools such as Halliday's concepts of field, tenor and mode (1985) and Scollon's (2000) Hymesian seven point grammar of context, permits flexibility to focus on meanings, on making sense of the place and of how the people fit into it. LE provides the range of tools to enable glimpses as an older layer slides out from beneath the modern Magill. The centre of the project is a house in the neighbourhood where the winemaking began, with the house-owner as the participant observer. A palette of small stories, suffused in the colours and seasons of wines and vines and vintages will use the language of generations whose voices the modern suburb no longer hears.
Stephens, M 2008 ‘They seemed to have read the chapter’ – a small indication of success in experiential learning paper to be presented to EASS teaching and Learning forum, November 2008
Stephens, M. (2007). Ethnographers of cruel practice: exploring student literacy practices and expectations, AAWP annual conference. Canberra. This paper was presented as part of a panel at the AAWP Annual Conference 2007. It links to Claire Woods’ paper outlining the context of ‘the Antwerp project’, an international endeavour which seeks to characterise the literacy experiences of students as they transition from one educational context to another. This paper offers some specifics of the preliminary data of a study exploring South Australian student literacy practices and expectations. Its focus is on how expectations about writing practice relate to perceptions of reading practice, and it argues that student focus group discussions reveal a process whereby students become ethnographers of their own reading practice. Using markedness theory from sociolinguistics and linguistic pragmatics [Grundy (2000), Myers-Scotton (1998)] it conjectures that reading university texts might be more objectionable for writing students than for science or management students, because of a disconnect between what they judge as good writing and what their lecturers tell them is writing which it is worthwhile to read.
Stephens M and Bourne I 2007 ‘The Toilet Papers’ paper to delivered at EASS Research Conference University of South Australia August 2007
Stephens M and Pike J 2007 ‘Usage not abusage’ paper delivered at Applied Linguistics Association of Australia conference Woollongong June 2007
Stephens M and Duffield J 2007 ‘Portraits and landscapes: the diaries of Esther Pocock, Emma Spragg and James Hassall’ paper delivered at ASAL conference Brisbane Queensland June 2007
Stephens, M 2004, ‘Review of Paul Simpson Stylistics: a resource book for students, Routledge, LondonNew York.’ ARAL September.
Stephens M 2007 ‘Making an Indonesian court seem incomprehensible: monolingual methods’ paper delivered at Australian Linguistics Society conference Adelaide September 2007
Stephens, M 2004, ‘Review of RD Fulk, and CM Cain, 2005 A History of Old English Literature Blackwell publishing Carlton’ ARAL September.
Stephens, Mia, Petrescu, Ioana & Reu, Ann (eds) 2005, Fuse or fracture: English as a world lingua franca, University of South Australia, Adelaide.
Stephens, M 2006, 'Healing East Timor through language understanding', chapter in M King-Boyes, [ed.] 2006 Healing Timor L'Este, pp 172-184 M King-Boyes Adelaide ISBN 0-646-46261-x
Stephens, M 2006, ‘Do not make stupid public notices’: interpreting commentary on the East Timor language policy’ in EASS Research Forum Proceedings University of South Australia August 2006 editor Ingrid Day
Stephens, Mia 2004, 'Preventing plagiarism with panellists’, paper presented at the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia, Adelaide.
Stephens, Mia 2005, 'review of Ramson W 2002 Lexical Images: the story of the Australian National Dictionary Melbourne: Oxford University Press', Australian Journal of Linguistics volume 25 no 1 April 2005
Stephens, Mia & Henschke, Ian 2005, Wordwise, Nexus, ABCAsia Pacific TV.
Stephens, M 2006, ‘Engaging Bilinguals’ in EASS Teaching and Learning Colloquium Proceedings University of South Australia August 2006 editor Ingrid Day
Stephens, M., I. Day, and G. Koch 2005. Rewards in Awards: getting to academic discourse through other kinds of formal discourse. EASS Teaching and learning conference, University of South Australia.
Expertise for Media Contact
I am able to provide media comment in the following areas of expertise:
Discipline: Linguistics
- Language
- The English Language
- Linguistics
- Applied Linguistics
- Communication- environment
Research Degree Supervisor
My own research links language to environmental management and education.But I am interested in all kinds of language research.
I have researched language learning and cross-cultural language behaviour.
Pragmatics and conversation analysis are strong teaching and research interests, along with lexicography.
My philosophy of supervision:
I encourage people to pursue their own interests. I try to be an enabler, to speak of 'cando' rather than 'can't do', particularly in terms of hybridising fields, disciplines, genres etc. However I sometimes encourage people away from blurred genres and in fact blurred anything.
This is because I believe that higher degree students benefit from firm guidelines. I try to deliver people into the comforting arms of strong traditional, unadventurous forms. Thus I am an interfering type rather than a handsoff type. I like to set a firm theoretical basis, to focus the collection of well delineated data, and to achieve a describable result of that process.
One of my favourite articles about methodology is at http://www.shu.ac.uk/daol/articles/v1/n1/a1/antaki2002002-paper.html By Antaki, C., M. Billig, et al. (2006). "Discourse Analysis Means Doing Analysis: A Critique Of Six Analytic Shortcomings." Discourse Analysis Online.
Current Projects:
Art of War: diversity of transductions for Sun Tzu's 510 BCE text
| Ancient texts which have successful translations can show directions for alternative literary nationalisms. When translators choose a book, they link to other translators and readers of the same text, in different languages and at different times. Before 510 BCE, Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War as a résumé. He wanted to become the military commander for the King of Wu. The treatise was not written for a wide audience yet it has been translated and interpreted extensively in China and in the West. We might consider the translators and readers of this range of translations in terms of a new kind of literary nationalism, a translation nation. Does this literary group relate to a nationalist literature for China or for the Chinese diaspora? The diversity of transductions tells us that this is probably not the way to interpret it. The paper looks at several translations and explores pathways to interpreting what kind of alternative literary nationalism might be visible in the repeated translations of this text. Translator after translator chooses this text and finds threads of knowledge which are deemed worthwhile translating, testifying to some kind of cultural core or essence. Some of the translations diverge far from the original genre, hence the term ‘transductions ‘[Kress and van Leeuwen 2001] is used to recognise the extent of this textual intervention. The translation theory which informs the analysis follows Hickey [1998] and Gentzler [2001]. Mia Stephens and Rosie Gronthos Abstract accepted for ‘Flogging a Dead Horse: Are National Literatures Finished?’ conference Alternative literary nationalisms stream |
| This research will investigate how third sector (non-government, non-profit organisations) are using their public online spaces and how this use can be made more effective and sustainable. In the first instance the research extends an established project, Sustainable Online Community Engagement (www.communitywebs.org), which is funded by the Office for Volunteers, State Government of South Australia, and operated by the School of Communication, University of South Australia. In this project, multimedia students build online products for community volunteer groups, which are then hosted for free on the Community Webs (Sustainable Online Community Engagement) server provided by the University of South Australia. Here the principal research problem relates to the ways in which, despite some ongoing assistance and training from project staff, community groups report that they often find it difficult to sustain effective use of their web sites and wikis. The overarching aim of this research project is to research and develop strategies to guide third sector organisations in developing and maintaining an effective online public presence, as well as developing a third sector online learning community on this topic, which can be sustained relatively independently by community groups. This research will be the beginning of a process which will continue beyond the candidature of the Professional Doctorate. It aims to contribute knowledge on effective online communication techniques and planning to third sector organisations, and to provide a model for community engagement and collaboration between universities, government and community organisations. Alice Dodd |
| Current affairs programs are variously perceived as reliable and credible sources of information or as tabloid programs as well as vehicles for infomercials or self-promotion. The paper looks at an interview on The 7.30 Report to assess how it constructs its social meaning. The method of analysis draws from the work of Arminen and his school of institutional conversational analysis, dealing with techniques such as how people avoid questions without refusing to answer them. “Part of strategic interaction entails defining the nature of the game: the parties may seek to define the game as being suitable for their purposes in terms of how competitive or cooperative it should be’ [Arminen 2005: 151]. The research takes place in an academic context where Emmertson [2005] has worked on the function of the confrontational questions which British TV interviewers ask their leaders, including Prince Charles. In the USA ‘Clayman and Heritage [2002] compared journalistic adversarialness in the press conferences of Eisenhower and Reagan, showing that journalists have become increasingly aggressive in treatment of the president ‘[Arminen 2005 p 237]. How aggressive is Kerry O’Brien on the 7.30 report and what service is he providing to Australians as he confronts their Prime Minister? This paper is the first to adopt CA to seek an answer. Sue Byrne and Mia Stephens Paper presented at EAS conference august 9 Unisa Magill |
| The communicative trend in language learning research over the last few decades has posed a challenged to ‘ancient’ languages like Old English, because the skills possessed by today’s students are increasingly distinct from the skills required to learn a text-based language. Language learning is now concerned with natural communication between speakers, and largely avoids the form-focused methods traditionally used to develop reading ability. But because ancient languages no longer have native speakers, the close study of grammar is unavoidable. The difficulty of grammar study for students without linguistic training has resulted in pessimism about the place of ancient languages and the methods they require. This critical autoethnographic thesis presents my own experience using the grammar translation method to study Old English, and suggests that the negatives associated with the method are overemphasised, while the positives are often forgotten. Using current second language acquisition (SLA) research as a framework, the thesis considers the challenges and overlooked benefits of grammar translation. As a positive account of an outdated method, the thesis aims to contribute to the debate about language learning methods from the perspective of ancient languages. John Pike Bachelor of Arts (Professional and Creative Communication) |
| Esther Pocock, Emma Spragg and James Hassall migrated to Australia in the nineteenth century. The framework used to theorise editing the texts is the Hallidayan systemic functional linguistics set of field, tenor and mode and Kress and van Leeuwen’s notion of multimodality. The paper describes how the factor of mode comes to be valued highly in a process of reformatting the contents and experimenting with ways of managing space in the text. It charts steps in the journey of trying to get to know the diarists better through various methods, starting with close reading of their diaries, applying a range of intellectual paradigms, and including physical travel and archival searches. Paper presented at ASAL Brisbane July 2007 Jodie Duffield and Mia Stephens, |
| The discussion that follows investigates students’ communication competence in professional engineering presentations to a professional panel. Fifteen students from three faculties were interviewed in a focus group, consisting of two to six students; prior to and after their presentations. They expressed their fear, highlighted difficulties presenting in English, and indicated the development of strategies to overcome the difficulties. |
| I was one of four people who set up a therapeutic refuge for homeless and abused girls in Adelaide in 1976. I have always wanted to write a memoir about that event and the circumstances surrounding it, so that it can be recorded as a part of Adelaide’s social welfare history. This research proposal outlines the social context, the significance of this this one central event, the positioning of my own involvement in the research issue, and a methodological pathway through the complexities of both recording and analyzing one woman’s progress through the radical social renewal of South Australia in the mid- to late 1970s . Marija Podnieks |
| The impetus for this paper arose out of the authors’ observation of what appeared to be divergent policy objectives for various renovations on the Magill university campus. On the one hand, there were toilet renovations that employed state-of-the-art power and water saving technologies while, just outside the door, handrails and skirting boards were being ripped up and dumped only to be replaced with similar or inferior quality. As students of communications and semiotics, the questions were posed; what are the perceived advantages of these changes, what do the renovations say about the University’s environmental awareness and its environmental policies and can an institution’s ‘morality’ be assessed by its adherence to its environmental policies? Following Sridhar & Camburn [1993] we brought together the concepts that our quality of life is affected by and symptomatic of the quality of the environment, that there is a UniSA environmental policy and that ‘professional’ means responsible. Following the embedded energy issue through the renovation story, we arrived at the conclusion that there are mixed messages in UniSA environmental management which might indicate muddled thinking. Mia Stephens and Ian Bourne |
| The suburb of Magill grew around the Penfolds vineyards which produce one of South Australia's favourite wines, Grange Hermitage. Oenologists and viticulturalists, tasters and wine-marketers live next door to newcomers, the university people and city commuters. When one long-term resident tells stories about his life, it is not only one life of oenology which emerges, but the lives of all the other oenologists, then life of the location, and the life of the wine itself. Linguistic ethnography [LE] is the method chosen to capture a range of stories from four generations of winemakers. The method, developed from varied scholarship investigating language in context, incorporating tools such as Halliday's concepts of field, tenor and mode (1985) and Scollon's (2000) Hymesian seven point grammar of context, permits flexibility to focus on meanings, on making sense of the place and of how the people fit into it. LE provides the range of tools to enable glimpses as an older layer slides out from beneath the modern Magill. The centre of the project is a house in the neighbourhood where the winemaking began, with the house-owner as the participant observer. A palette of small stories, suffused in the colours and seasons of wines and vines and vintages will use the language of generations whose voices the modern suburb no longer hears. |
| AUSTRALIA POST 9/11: Language, Identity and Culture My starting point for this thesis is the question ‘Who are we now?’ I found myself having a conversation with my inner voice around this question over the period after The World Trade Centre catastrophe, commonly referred to as ‘9/11’. By ‘we’, I meant ‘Australians’. As my own life had been touched by the event, (albeit in a much less dramatic way than some), I felt a greater sense of connection to the world at large after September 11, 2001. I was also profoundly disturbed by the responses of world leaders and reluctant to take for granted the ‘story’ that our leader John Howard and the media were ‘selling’ to the Australian public. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, debate about ‘terrorism’ and ‘security’ dominated both John Howard’s rhetoric and the media. Within public debates, the ‘language of war’ was foregrounded; other important issues such as climate change and reconciliation with indigenous peoples were pushed even further into the background. This thesis will interrogate the role of language in the shaping our collective (Australian) consciousness since 9/11. With reference to key texts, such as Brett’s ‘Exit Right: The Unravelling of John Howard’, Moore’s ‘The Prime Minister’s bad language’ and Roy’s The algebra of Infinite Justice, the thesis will foreground a discussion about the impact of language on identity and culture. By adopting a ficto-critical/ethnographic approach to the textual analysis of various Australian cultural artefacts, including video/DVD, film, comedy, newspaper and radio commentary, within a methodological framework encompassing Post-colonialism and Psychoanalysis, the thesis aims to critique the ‘language of war’ and reflect on its impacts on the Australian consciousness. Kathryn Pentecost |
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