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Philip ShawProfessor Emeritus

About me

Philip retired in 2015 but is still active in a desultory way, reviewing things, updating publications, etc. 

He was educated at Oxford, Reading and Newcastle Universities. He received a Ph.D. from Newcastle in 1983. The title of his dissertation was The major derivatives from place-names in English and German. Before doing his MA in Linguistics at Reading he worked in Thailand (Chiang Mai and Nakhon Pathom) for four years. Between the MA and the PhD he worked in Germany, mainly at the University of Bonn. From 1978 to 1996 he was a Lecturer, latterly Senior Lecturer, in the Language Centre of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. In 1996 he was attacked by itchy feet again: he worked as a Senior Lecturer at the Århus School of Business for four years, and has been at Stockholm University, as a Senior Lecturer and/or Docent since 2000, and as a Professor from 2005 to his retirement in 2015. From 2006-2008 he worked part-time as a guest professor at the Unit for Languages and Communication at KTH, the Royal Institute of Technology. In the summer he is interested in birds, botany and butterflies, and now he has retired he spends a lot of time on Naturskyddsföreningen, the Swedish organisation for nature conservation. 

He used to teach courses on World Englishes, second language acquisition, and languages for specific purposes.

His publications include many articles on applied aspects of academic and business English (and some on word-formation) and the textbook World Englishes: an Introduction (with Gunnel Melchers; 2003, second edition 2011, third edition, with Peter Sundkvist, 2019).  He was co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of English for Academic Purposes (2016) and Student Plagiarism in Higher Education (2018). Four ex-funded projects are still somewhat active:

  • PROFILE (led by Diane Pecorari, Linné with colleagues from Linné and Chalmers) which examines the quality and quantity of English acquired by doing an MA in another subject through the medium of English.
  • EVA (with Hans Malmström, Diane Pecorari, Aileen Irvine, and Spela Mezek) which looks at students’ acquisition of vocabulary from reading in English while taking courses in Swedish (funded by Vetenskapsrådet 2009-11).
  • AAA project 4, (with Alan McMillion and Spela Mezek) which compares Swedish students’ reading comprehension and processes with those of British equivalents required to read the same textbook and has tried to do the same with listening comprehension. (The AAA project, involving many members of the SU Faculty of Humanities, is funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Fund 2006-12)
  • and a nameless project (with Tim Caudery and Margrethe Petersen) on accent, motivation, and language learning among exchange students at universities in Denmark and Sweden (funded by Nordplus Språk 2004-2006).

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

  • Developing a new academic vocabulary test

    2019. Diane Pecorari, Philip Shaw, Hans Malmström. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 39, 59-71

    Article

    Despite the central role of vocabulary in language learning, and the increasing interest in academic vocabulary, materials for testing academic vocabulary are not common. This paper reports on the development of a new test of academic vocabulary. Test items were based on a relatively recently developed list of academic vocabulary. They were then piloted, refined, and two comparable forms of the test were produced. The paper describes the approaches used to assess the validity and equivalence of the two forms of the test. Research and pedagogical implications and uses of the test are discussed. 

    Read more about Developing a new academic vocabulary test

  • Engaging with Terminology in the Multilingual Classroom

    2017. Hans Malmström (et al.). Classroom Discourse 8 (1), 3-18

    Article

    In some academic settings where English is not the first language it is nonetheless common for reading to be assigned in English, and the expectation is often that students will acquire subject terminology incidentally in the first language as well as in English as a result of listening and reading. It is then a prerequisite that students notice and engage with terminology in both languages. To this end, teachers’ classroom practices for making students attend to and engage with terms are crucial for furthering students’ vocabulary competence in two languages. Using transcribed video recordings of eight undergraduate lectures from two universities in such a setting, this paper provides a comprehensive picture of what teachers ‘do’ with terminology during a lecture, i.e. how terms are allowed to feature in the classroom discourse. It is established, for example, that teachers nearly always employ some sort of emphatic practice when using a term in a lecture. However, the repertoire of such practices is limited. Further, teachers rarely adapt their repertoires to cater to the special needs arguably required in these settings, or to exploit the affordances of multilingual environments.

    Read more about Engaging with Terminology in the Multilingual Classroom

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