Research Interests

Brief overview of her professional life

From 1970 to 1985 Roz taught English language, literacy and study skills to children and adults in Devon, London and Stockton, California. She was director of the Language Support Unit at Kingsway-Princeton College of Further Education in London. She was a lecturer in adult literacy, language and learning at Garnett College for teachers in further and higher education before joining the staff at Lancaster in 1986. From 1986 to 2008 she was a full-time member of the Department of Linguistics and English Language and from 2002 she was an Associate Director of the Literacy Research Centre. In September 2008 she was appointed Professor Emerita.

She was an active member of The British Association for Applied Linguistics , and was the Chairperson of the Committee for Linguistics in Education .for many years. She has been an active member of the Research and Practice in Adult Literacy Group since its inception.

Recent research activities

She co-directed the Leverhulme and ESRC-funded research projects which developed the Lancaster Corpus of Children's Project Writing . She worked within the Lancaster node of the National Research and Development Centre for Adult Literacy and Numeracy, based in the Lancaster Literacy Research Centre . She was the overall director of the ESRC TLRP research project Literacies for Learning in Further Education, which was a collaboration between the Literacy Research Centre at Lancaster University and the Centre for Research on Lifelong Learning at the University of Stirling. She was also a co-director of the associated ESRC TLRP research project Bilingual Literacies for Learning in Further Education. These two projects researched the in-college and out-of-college literacy practices of students on a wide range of vocational and academic courses in Further Education colleges inEngland, Scotland and Wales.

Continuing research interests

• writer identity,
• intertextuality,
• multimodal communication,
• writing practices in both academic and non-academic settings,
• the relationship between research and practice,
• adult literacy,
• educational linguistics,
• critical language awareness-raising,
• punctuation,
• academic discourse practices,
• applications of van Leeuwen's Theory of Representation,
• literacies for learning in Further Education,
• the literacy practices of vocational education professionals.