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Dr Alison Moore

BA Hons (Linguistics), MPH, PhD (Linguistics)
Office: 19.2096
Phone: +61 2 4221 4949
Email: amoore@uow.edu.au

Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics

I joined the University of Wollongong in July 2009 to convene the English Language and Linguistics Program. I studied general and functional Linguistics as an undergraduate, then worked and studied in public health and epidemiology at Westmead Hospital and Sydney University. My interest in the meaning-making side of public health issues and interventions led me back to Macquarie to do a PhD on agency and decision-making in medicine, from a linguistic perspective. I was then awarded an ARC Postdoctoral Fellowship to study interaction in surgery, which I took at Macquarie. I have also had short term & casual teaching positions in the Department of English at University of Sydney, and the Centre for Values, Ethics and the Law in Medicine, at University of Sydney.

Awards & Fellowships

NHMRC/PHRDC Postgraduate Scholarship (PhD scholarship)
ARC Post-Doctoral Fellowship

Subject Coordinator

ELL 171 – An introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics
ELL 271 – Grammar and Meaning
ELL 371 – Grammar and Meaning 2
ELL 314 – Language and Ideology (co-teaching with Helen Caple)
ELL 310 – Global Englishes

Research Profile

Searchable RIS Publications database >>

Selected Publications

Book chapters

• Moore, A. (in press) Surgical teams in action: a contextually sensitive approach to modelling body alignment and interpersonal engagement. In Baldry, A. and Montagna, E. (eds), Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Multimodality: Theory and Practice, Campobasso, Italy: Palladino.
• ACA Food Access and Equity Taskforce (as author). (1991). Food access and equity. In Australian Consumers’ Association. Towards a National Food Policy. Sydney: ACA.

Peer-reviewed journal articles

• Moore, A. and Tuckwell, K. (2006) A tenorless genre? Forensic generic profiling of workers’ compensation dispute resolution discourse. Linguistics and the Human Sciences 2.2: 205–232. Special issue on genre, edited by John Bateman.
• Lobb, E., Butow, P., Moore, A., Barratt, A., Tucker, K., Gaff, C, Kirk, J., Dudding, T., Butt, D., (2006) Development of a communication aid to facilitate risk communication in consultations with women from high risk breast cancer families: a pilot study. Journal of Genetic Counselling 15:393-405.
• Brown, R., Butow, P., Butt, D.G., Moore, A.R., and Tattersall, M.H. (2004) Developing ethical strategies to assist oncologists in seeking informed consent to cancer clinical trials. Social Science & Medicine 58: 379-390.
• Moore, A. (2005) Modelling agency in HIV decision-making. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics. Special Edition S19:103-122.
• Moore, A., Candlin, C.N., and Plum, G.A. (2001) Making sense of HIV-related Viral Load: one expert or two? Culture Health and Sexuality 3: 229-250.

Research Priority Areas Groups

In most of my research I use theories and methods from functional linguistics to address issues that are important to participants in social and life and contexts of care, especially health care.

Across the different projects, one of the questions I keep coming back to is how social actors construe and negotiate agency through language and other symbolic modes. My doctoral research explored shared decision-making in HIV medicine, looking at the ways in which people with HIV and their doctors used agentive construals of themselves and each other as a key resource for taking a joint approach rather than a more unilateral one. In my postdoctoral work on safety and surgical teamwork, I also analysed how choices in gaze, proximity and movement interact with choices in spoken language to enact – and sometimes contest – complex and shifting agentive roles among team members. More recently in an NHMRC project on psychotherapeutic talk, I have been mapping how patients’ speech seems to index an emerging sense of agency that is consistent with clinical judgements of therapeutic progress.

My other persistent theoretical concern is to do with relations between language and context – it is clear that there is a dialectic between language, meaning and context, but how can we best model and operationalise these relations? An ongoing project here, with colleagues from the Centre for Language in Social Life at Macquarie University, is to explore and test developments of Halliday’s concept of ‘register’. A further theoretical/methodological goal is to develop ways of linking SFL-based text analytic approaches with reception studies.

Research Groups

CAPSTRANS – Member
IERI – Associate Member
Centre for Language in Social Life, Macquarie University – Member

Current Research Projects

What’s in a conversation? Discourse correlates of therapeutic talk in the Conversational Model of psychotherapy. NHMRC Project
A collaborative project with Em/Prof Russell Meares (Westmead Hospital), and A/Professor David Butt & Dr Caroline Henderson-Brooks (Macquarie University). This work aims to make more explicit the kinds of linguistic patternings that occur in talk that is taken as ‘progress’ by therapists.

Systemic Safety: the meanings of behaviour in contexts of surgical care
ARC Postdoctoral Fellowship and ARC Project Funded 2004-2007, but still an active project with A/Prof David Butt (Macquarie) and Prof John Cartmill (Nepean Hospital/ Mac. U). This project explores interacting systems of communication, as exemplified by the context of surgery. Increasingly, adverse events in operative care are considered systemic rather than a product of system breakdown. Existing systems, and how they lead to adverse events, need to be made more explicit. We describe surgical practice as a system of meaning-bearing systems, integrated from context to content to expression, and incorporating language and other symbolic systems.

Effectiveness of consumer medicines information
This project is consolidating evidence related to Consumer Medicine Information (CMI) effectiveness, to enhance the effectiveness of medicines information in community pharmacy practice. My role has been to help evaluate existing CMI formats and, working with the document designer, develop alternative formats while considering how this changes the ‘content’ of the messages, the likely reading strategies and the discourse and interactive strategies that pharmacists and consumers use in the trials of new formats for providing CMI.

Metonymic Cuties – The linguistics of individuation in ecological debate
This new project will examine discourses that discuss (or underpin discussions about) animal welfare, ecology and environment protection. It will i) identify patterns of grammar and argument which promote an unreflective conflation of the concepts of species and individual in non-human organisms; ii) examine the extent to which such patterns promote an unproductive slippage between concern for the interests of species as ecological entities and of members of such species; and iii) identify possible collaborations between ecolinguistics, animal studies, and philosophical approaches to the study of animal and human wellbeing, including environmental ethics.

Putting Halliday’s theory of ‘language in use’ into use
A collaboration between colleagues from the Centre for Language in Social Life at Macquarie University (Lukin, Herke, Wu, and Wegener). We are exploring the development of the concept of register in SFL and the theoretical work the term does within the SFL paradigm. One significant development in this work has been proposals for modelling context paradigmatically, through system networks. My contribution includes demonstrations of context network modelling from surgery, HIV medicine, and Consumer Medicines.

Preferred Research Supervision Areas 

• Language as strategy and as evidence in social research and practice 
• Theory and method in discourse analysis including Systemic Functional Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, interactional sociolinguistics
• Multimodal analysis, including integrating analyses of verbal and non-verbal behaviour 
• Register theory
• Linguistic and social-theoretic models of agency 
• Diverse discourses of health 
• Interaction in clinical contexts and other contexts of care 
• Organisational and professional discourse 
• Music and text

Higher Degree Research and Honours Supervision

Current doctoral candidates

Ms Yuki Oe
Persuasive Writing in Japanese

Mr Mohammad Ibrahim 
Argument xonstruction in the Argumentative/ Persuasive Essays (APEs) by Malaysian and Australian tertiary students: A Systemic Functional approach 

Completed students/ topics supervised elsewhere 

Dr Bradley Smith 
A registerial approach to modelling intonation. Awarded 2008, Macquarie University. Co-supervised with Professor Christian Matthiessen 

Ms Sally Brookes 
Towards a theory of spoken language for Gestalt Therapy: Developing a linguistic point of entry 

Dr Tony Korner 
Evaluative language, autonomic response and Conversation Model of Psychotherapy 

Mr Michael Lewis 
Communication strategies in letters of complaint 

Mr Peter Wylie 
Grammatical Metaphor and Pragmatics 

Ms Sarah Bartlett 
Linguistic resources for interaction among children with Asperger’s syndrome