Rodney H. Jones

• PhD
• Professor at University of Reading

This paper discusses the way the concept of culture is discursively constructed by large language models that are trained on massive collections of cultural artefacts and designed to produce probabilistic representations of culture based on this training data. It makes the argument that, no matter how ‘diverse’ their training data is, large languag...

The naming of the novel coronavirus was notably one of the most politically sensitive aspects of the pandemic. After former US President Donald Trump began using the term “Chinese Virus” in March 2020, partisans with different tribal affiliations in various countries and regions rushed to formulate arguments for and against using geographically mar...

This paper explores the relationship between epistemologies, tribalism and affect in the experiences of Chinese international students studying in the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on data from student diaries, interviews, and focus groups, it explores how boundaries between in-groups and out-groups were erected and dismantled through pr...

Health Claims (Health Claims) on food packages are statements used to describe the relationship between the nutritional content and the health benefits of food products. They are popularly used by food manufacturers to attract consumers and promote their products. How to design and develop NLP tools to better support the food industry to predict th...

Despite denials from tech executives, fact-checks from journalists and explanations from security experts, the "conspiracy theory" that internet companies listen to people's conversations via the microphones in their mobile phones persists. This paper explores the ways people make sense of their everyday encounters with digital surveillance, and ho...

In this article, we reflect on the epistemological frameworks and priorities of intercultural communication research regarding ‘cultural differences’. With the current challenge posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, along with the growing political and social polarisation in recent years, we argue for a need to (re)focus attention to the ways acts of dis...

This accessible and entertaining textbook introduces students to both traditional and more contemporary approaches to sociolinguistics in a real-world context, addressing current social problems that students are likely to care about, such as racism, inequality, political conflict, belonging, and issues around gender and sexuality. Each chapter inc...

This accessible and entertaining textbook introduces students to both traditional and more contemporary approaches to sociolinguistics in a real-world context, addressing current social problems that students are likely to care about, such as racism, inequality, political conflict, belonging, and issues around gender and sexuality. Each chapter inc...

This accessible and entertaining textbook introduces students to both traditional and more contemporary approaches to sociolinguistics in a real-world context, addressing current social problems that students are likely to care about, such as racism, inequality, political conflict, belonging, and issues around gender and sexuality. Each chapter inc...

This accessible and entertaining textbook introduces students to both traditional and more contemporary approaches to sociolinguistics in a real-world context, addressing current social problems that students are likely to care about, such as racism, inequality, political conflict, belonging, and issues around gender and sexuality. Each chapter inc...

This accessible and entertaining textbook introduces students to both traditional and more contemporary approaches to sociolinguistics in a real-world context, addressing current social problems that students are likely to care about, such as racism, inequality, political conflict, belonging, and issues around gender and sexuality. Each chapter inc...

This accessible and entertaining textbook introduces students to both traditional and more contemporary approaches to sociolinguistics in a real-world context, addressing current social problems that students are likely to care about, such as racism, inequality, political conflict, belonging, and issues around gender and sexuality. Each chapter inc...

This accessible and entertaining textbook introduces students to both traditional and more contemporary approaches to sociolinguistics in a real-world context, addressing current social problems that students are likely to care about, such as racism, inequality, political conflict, belonging, and issues around gender and sexuality. Each chapter inc...

This accessible and entertaining textbook introduces students to both traditional and more contemporary approaches to sociolinguistics in a real-world context, addressing current social problems that students are likely to care about, such as racism, inequality, political conflict, belonging, and issues around gender and sexuality. Each chapter inc...

This accessible and entertaining textbook introduces students to both traditional and more contemporary approaches to sociolinguistics in a real-world context, addressing current social problems that students are likely to care about, such as racism, inequality, political conflict, belonging, and issues around gender and sexuality. Each chapter inc...

This accessible and entertaining textbook introduces students to both traditional and more contemporary approaches to sociolinguistics in a real-world context, addressing current social problems that students are likely to care about, such as racism, inequality, political conflict, belonging, and issues around gender and sexuality. Each chapter inc...

This accessible and entertaining textbook introduces students to both traditional and more contemporary approaches to sociolinguistics in a real-world context, addressing current social problems that students are likely to care about, such as racism, inequality, political conflict, belonging, and issues around gender and sexuality. Each chapter inc...

This accessible and entertaining textbook introduces students to both traditional and more contemporary approaches to sociolinguistics in a real-world context, addressing current social problems that students are likely to care about, such as racism, inequality, political conflict, belonging, and issues around gender and sexuality. Each chapter inc...

This accessible and entertaining textbook introduces students to both traditional and more contemporary approaches to sociolinguistics in a real-world context, addressing current social problems that students are likely to care about, such as racism, inequality, political conflict, belonging, and issues around gender and sexuality. Each chapter inc...

This article examines the representations of Saudi women driving that circulated shortly after the lifting of the ban and considers the social, commercial and technological forces that helped to shape those representations . A corpus of images was collected from two international image banks – Getty and Shutterstock – as well as from a Google Image...

This paper explores the metalinguistic tactics used by Hong Kong protesters in 2014 and 2019 and how they reflected and exploited a range of dominant ideologies about language in the city. These tactics are considered both in terms of their rhetorical utility in the “message war” between protesters and authorities, and their significance in the bro...

This paper analyses the COVID-19 narratives of US President Donald Trump and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, combining principles from applied linguistic approaches to illness narratives and sociolinguistic approaches to language and gender. It focuses specifically on the ways Johnson and Trump structured their stories to portray themselves as cer...

Despite denials from tech executives, fact-checks from journalists and explanations from security experts, what Mark Zurkerberg calls ‘this conspiracy theory that gets passed around’ that internet companies listen to people’s conversations via the microphones in their mobile phones persists (‘Transcript…’ 2018). This paper explores the ways people...

Consumer understanding and acceptance of health claims are influenced by a variety of factors including personal knowledge and familiarity with the information, characteristics of the product (such as the ingredients) and the way the claim is presented (e.g. wording and visual aids such as symbols). The official wording of authorised EU health clai...

In this chapter, I will discuss how technology can affect our study of the humanities and the way the humanities can offer insights into our encounters with technology. The theoretical framework that will form the basis of this discussion is mediated discourse analysis (Norris and Jones 2005; Scollon 2001), an approach to discourse which focuses on...

This contribution discusses the ways people hold themselves and others accountable for everyday practices of surveillance. It analyses three examples: (1) the “breeching experiments” of the video artist “Surveillance Camera Man,” (2) a “stop and frisk” incident involving a 17‐year‐old boy in Harlem, and (3) the pop‐up windows on websites that ask f...

Most accounts of the way digital technologies have changed practices of reading and writing have focused on surface aspects of digital texts (such as hypertextuality, multimodality and the development of new registers). There are, however, less visible aspects of digital communication environments that have had an equally profound effect on reading...

This paper focuses on how advanced learners of English at a woman’s college in Saudi Arabia use Snapchat to communicate with their classmates. It examines not just the way the English language becomes a meaning making resource in these exchanges, but also how English is strategically mixed with photos, drawings, emoji’s, and other languages to crea...

This introduction explores the four main themes of the papers in this special issue: 1) ‘language, languaging and translanguaging’ 2) ‘mobility and space’ 3) ‘transcultural identities’ and 4) ‘institutional and individual constraints on creativity’, and discusses how engagement with these themes helps the authors to move beyond traditional notions...

This article analyses the discursive construction of agency in narratives of 'mediated self-care', stories of disease management and/or recovery in which particular material or discursive technologies play a central part. Specifically, it analyses two stories of self-care, one told in the context of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and the other to...

Most linguistic landscape research to date has focused on how people read and write language in the material world. Much less attention has been paid to the way linguistic landscapes sometimes read and write their inhabitants through technologies like CCTV cameras, intruder alarms, and other aspects of the built environment designed to make people...

The video documentation of police violence against citizens, and the circulation of these videos over mainstream and social media, has played an important part in many contemporary social movements, from the Black Lives Matter Movement in the U.S. to the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. Such videos serve as both evidence of police abuses and discurs...

This article provides research guidelines for authors intending to submit their manuscripts to TESOL Quarterly. These guidelines include information about the TESOL Quarterly review process, advice on converting a dissertation into a research article, broad introductions to a number of research methods, and a section on research ethics. The researc...

In a YouTube video entitled ‘Suicide Candy’ a poster named Sir Sebastian displays a bag of White Rabbit Creamy Candy and declares dramatically: I’ll be the first one to admit I’ve eaten a lot of weird candy treats in my day. Scorpion lollypops. Mexican maggots. But never, NEVER, have I ever been in so much danger than I am with the creamy candy by...

The term digital literacies refers to the practices of reading, writing and communication made possible by digital media. The articles in this special issue explore the impact of such digital practices on language learning, examining a) new needs of language learners in the digital age, and b) new globalized, online contexts for language learning....