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Dr Aisling O'Boyle

BSc (Hons), PGDip, DELTA, MA, PhD
Lecturer

Room 01.014
20 College Green
School of Education
Queen's University Belfast

Tel: +44 (0)28 9097 5935
Fax: +44 (0)28 9097 5066
Email: a.oboyle@qub.ac.uk

 

Leadership Roles: 
EdD Course Director
Programme Coordinator MSc TESOL

Teaching: 
Language Awareness for TESOL, Language Learning for TESOL (MSc)
Discourse and Pedagogy, Introduction to doctoral level research in TESOL (EdD)

Research Interests:

Discourse and Education: discourse in educational contexts, spoken academic discourse, classroom talk, the relationship between thinking and speaking.  Corpora and Education: the design and application of corpora in educational contexts.  Sociocultural approaches to English Language learning and teaching.


Research Projects:

Centre Research Study 14-19: funded by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) and led by Prof. Jo-Anne Baird (Univeristy of Oxford) and Prof. Jannette Elwood (Queen’s University Belfast). The project examined the impact of the 14-19 education reform programme on 52 schools and colleges across England using a case study approach.

UNITALK: is a 125, 000 word corpus of university talk in Northern Ireland. This spoken academic corpus was designed and constructed to investigate the dialogic construction of knowledge in small group teaching and learning contexts. It enables the investigation of university classroom discourse; discourse roles of tutors and students, question asking and answering, elaboration and evaluation, and formulaic language.

ELLTTALK: is a 40,000 word corpus of English Language Learner Task Talk. This corpus was constructed to investigate English Language learner talk in classroom contexts. It enables the investigation of English language learning, language learning tasks, and comparisons between General English and English for Academic Purposes in classroom contexts

Exploring a multilingual corpus for language learning and teaching: This project examines the features of fluency in spoken discourse using an audio-visual multilingual corpus (CAP, University of Barcelona), a corpus of academic English and a corpus of learner discourse.


Publications:

  • O’Boyle, A. (2013) “Valuing the talk of young people: are we nearly there yet?” London Review of Education, 11:2: pp127-139.
  • Baird, J., Elwood, J., Duffy, G., Feiler, A., O’Boyle, A., Rose, J.  and Stobart, G.  (2011) 14-19 Centre Research Study.  Qualifications and Curriculum Authority Report.
  • O’Boyle, A. (2010) “Intercultural aspects of thinking skills in an intercultural language learning context” Language, Society and Culture, 31: pp62-71.
  • Morison, S., O’Boyle, A. (2008) “Developing professional identity: a study of the perceptions of first year nursing, medical, dental and pharmacy students” in Callara, L.E. (Ed) Nursing Challenges in the 21st Century NY: Nova Science Publishers. pp195-219.
  • Morison, S., O’Boyle, A., Walsh. S. (2007) “New Approaches to Learning in Higher Education in the UK”, in Flogaitis, S. and Kyriazis, A. (Eds) (2007) European Higher Education Institutions in the 21st Century: What Prospects? European Public Law Series. Bibliotheque de Driot Public Europeen. London: Esperia Publications. pp93-113.


Selected Conference Presentations:

 

Invited speaker:

  • O’Boyle, A. (2011) “Asking, Negotiating, and Answering Questions in University Classrooms: Noticing the Gap Between What Real Data Tell Us and What Current ELT Materials Provide” presented at MATSDA: Materials Development Association Conference, February 5-6th February, 2011 Queens’ University, Belfast, UK. http://www.matsda.org.uk/conferences/annual_conf/belfast_2011.htm

Refereed Seminar Series:

  • O’Boyle, A. (2009) “Little steps or a foot in the door?: Using a corpus of spoken academic discourse in teacher education programmes” presented at the British Association of Applied Linguistics/Cambridge University Press Seminar Programme “Academic Language Corpora and Education”, University of Edinburgh,7-8 May 2009. http://www.baal.org.uk/seminars_2009.htm

Selected refereed conference presentations:

  • O’Boyle, A. (2011) "8 out of 10 questions: asking and answering in university classroom talk". Lecture presentation at the 12th International Pragmatics Conference, Manchester 3-8 July 2011 http://ipra.ua.ac.be/main.aspx?c=.CONFERENCE12&n=1411
  • O’Boyle, A. (2010) “There is no one right answer”: stance and evaluation in university subject territories: corpus studies in education. The Fifth Inter-Varietal Applied Corpus Studies Conference: Connecting Corpus Linguistics, Moray House School of Education, University of Edinburgh,18-19 June 2010.
  • O’Boyle, A. (2009) “‘You and I: what do we mean?’: Investigating discourse and education” presented at the Inter-Varietal Applied Corpus Studies Symposium “Corpora and Interaction” University of Edinburgh, 22 January 2009.
  • O’Boyle, A. (2007) “’What do you mean ''if you look at…’: Elaborating and lexical bundles in classroom contexts” presented at the 10th International Pragmatics Conference, University of Goteborg, Sweden, 8-13 July 2007 http://ipra.ua.ac.be/download.aspx?c=*CONFERENCE2006&n=1325&ct=1198&e=4997
  • Morison, S., O’Boyle, A (2006) “Becoming a Professional: First year healthcare students’ perceptions of professional identity” paper presented in an invited symposium entitled; “Students in Transition” at the Northern Ireland British Psychological Society Annual Conference, The Wellington Park Hotel, Belfast,  12-14 May 2006.
  • O’Boyle, A. (2006) “I mean, what she means is…”: Regulation in a language classroom. Paper presented at the Language and Action Conference: Vygotskian and Leontievian Legacy Today at the Centre for Applied Language Studies & Department of Languages, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. 7th-10th June 2006 http://www.solki.jyu.fi/english/conference2006/Language%20in%20Action_Final.pdf
  • Murphy, B., O’Boyle, A. (2005) “LI-BEL CASE: a corpus of spoken academic English”. 6th annual conference of the American Association of Applied Corpus Linguistics and the 26th annual conference of the International Archive of Modern and Medieval English, University of Michigan, May 2005. http://robfelty.com/design/archives/corpusconference/abstracts/abstract63.pdf
  • O’Boyle, A. (2004) “In light of Inner Speech”. 11th Annual Meeting of the Sociocultural Theory in Second Language Learning Research Working Group. University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands, August 2004.
  • O’Boyle, A. (2004) “I haven’t learnt to think in English yet”. 2nd Inter- varietal Applied Corpus Studies Conference, Queen’s University, Belfast, June 2004.
  • O’Boyle, A. (2003) “Inner speech as an Interface” poster presented at 36th Annual Meeting of the British Association of Applied Linguistics, University of Leeds, September 2003.