Isobelle Clarke

This concise volume spotlights an innovative computer-aided approach to linguistic analyses of HPV vaccination discourse on Twitter. The book features a new corpus linguistic technique, developed by the lead author, to studying patterns of language use in large datasets over time, otherwise known as Keyword Co-Occurrence Analysis. The authors explore the potential of social media platforms as rich areas of study for health communication and vaccination discourse, with this particular methodology allowing for detailed analysis of over half a million tweets from nearly 15 years of data. Given the increasingly influential role of social media platforms such as Twitter in shaping vaccine hesitancy, the volume offers readers a more nuanced understanding of their influence on attitudes around important health issues and a valuable resource in facilitating increased vaccine uptake. This book will be key reading for students, scholars, and policymakers interested in the intersection of language and health, in such areas as corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, health communication, and applied linguistics.

How do language learners interact with those who already speak the language they are learning? It is more than just a question of learning vocabulary and grammars – learners also need to learn how to put together conversations in their new language and to vary the way they interact across different contexts. This book shows, using millions of words of data, how this happens. It is the first large scale, corpus-based exploration of the discourse macro-structures in conversational interaction between L1 and L2 speakers, and explores three corpora to show, in spoken interaction with L1 speakers across a range of tasks, the dynamics of discourse construction. Considering factors including cultural background, task and proficiency, it characterises the repertoire of discourse functions used in these interactions and shows how they vary according to a range of variables. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.