Nick Wilson

Academic misconduct represents an assessment design challenge, rather than a security challenge. We cannot secure everything, and technology will always be able to adapt to any security measures put in place. Drawing upon de-identified cases from Academic Integrity Matters, this interactive workshop provides examples of how concerns were first spotted, what further investigations uncovered, and how assessment redesign could have reduced the likelihood of the misconduct occurring.
Participants will explore the relationship between assessment design, assurance of learning, and academic integrity through a series of practical case studies. The workshop will then shift perspective, inviting participants to step into the role of an Academic Integrity Investigator. Working in small groups, we will analyse a fictitious misconduct case using evidence similar to that considered during a formal investigation. Participants will evaluate the available evidence, determine appropriate next steps, consider a student response, and apply a penalty determination matrix to reach an outcome. This will prompt participants to reflect on the challenges faced by academic integrity investigators when determining outcomes in misconduct cases.
The session will provide practical insights into designing assessments that promote authentic learning while reducing opportunities for academic misconduct.

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and Tertiary Education Quality Standards Agency (TEQSA) requirements are catalysts for driving higher education institutions to reflect on and uplift assessment products so that they preserve academic integrity and evidence student outcomes. This presentation will analyse quantitative data extracted from the Curriculum Information Repository (CIR) (Akari Software). More specifically, the number and diversity of assessment products across the University of the Sunshine Coast, including the most prevalent and least frequently used assessment types. Additionally, we explore the distribution of assessment products across the five Schools. Most importantly we showcase opportunities and practical strategies for uplifting assessment products to enhance assured learning for both blended and asynchronous delivery modes.

This chapter analyses the linguistic practices of two coaches of a rugby team in New Zealand, specifically examining how they employ personal pronouns, familiar address terms, and personal names to navigate the dynamics of player-directed communication. Building upon existing research, the study contrasts coach-talk during training sessions with match days, highlighting the strategic use of language in different contexts and with different addressees. Adopting an interactional sociolinguistics framework and drawing upon linguistic ethnography and corpus linguistics, the analysis reveals that the choice of personal pronouns, particularly the pseudo-inclusive first-person plural we, serves to foster an illusion of inclusivity while mitigating potential face threats associated with directives. Moreover, familiar address terms, such as mate and bro, are shown to enhance relational solidarity, while personal names specify addressees in multi-party interaction and provide a direct means of engagement but are rarely used in dyadic interaction. The findings illustrate that coaches’ referential choices play a crucial role in constructing team identity, managing power dynamics, and enhancing communication efficacy within a sporting context, and that the specification of addressee and person reference plays a central role in the discourse strategies they adopt to enact leadership.

For more than two decades there have been claims of a shift in the way various linguistic taboos (i.e. swearwords and slurs) are used and perceived by members of the broader community. This supposed shift, which is believed to reflect the current values maintained by society on the whole, has prompted social commentators and researchers alike to suggest that the most taboo words no longer relate to sex, religion, or bodily effluvia, but derive from a domain of language classified as "-IST language" (i.e. disparaging or pejorative language targeting people sharing similar characteristics). To test this claim in an Australian context, the authors of this paper asked 60 Australian-born university students to complete an online survey assessing not only each participant's personal perception of swearing, (potentially) offensive, and taboo language, but also their thoughts concerning the way the Australian population at large view various taboo terms. The results of this survey indicate that language which was once deemed to be the most offensive and taboo, has been overtaken in terms of taboo by -IST language.

Considering the need for pedagogically effective learning activities and materials to support language learning, particularly within teacher-led instruction, it is curious that at present there is no overarching, research-based framework available to educators to draw from when designing and implementing such activities and materials. To address this gap, the authors of this paper have drawn from a host of relevant research pertaining to cognitive neuroscience, educational psychology, and second language acquisition to establish a framework for designing and implementing activities and learning materials capable of facilitating enhanced language learning outcomes within an inclusive classroom. Incorporating ten key considerations – attention and focus, desirable difficulty, depth of processing, deliberate practice, novelty and surprise, wakeful rest, visible learning, meaningful feedback, affective engagement, and strategic choice and use – this versatile framework not only provides teachers with necessary knowledge for designing language learning activities and materials in an engaging and efficacious manner but may also embolden them to do so.

Although swearing is often perceived as intrinsically offensive language, it is how swearing use is indexed against a person’s understanding of local social norms that constructs swearing as offensive. This paper presents an analysis of swearing within a social context where high frequency swearing is a norm: a male rugby team in New Zealand. Drawing upon a dataset collected from ethnographically collected authentic interactions, an analysis of the frequency of swear words and a comparison with other English corpora is presented, followed by an interactional sociolinguistic analysis of how swearing is used in interactions. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate not only how swearing can be used to engender solidarity, but that a range of socio-pragmatic functions of swearing such as intensifying and indexing a vernacular identity, can be used in performing leadership.

Sociolinguistics is the study of the interaction between language and society. In this classic introductory work, Janet Holmes and Nick Wilson examine the role of language in a variety of social contexts, considering both how language works and how it can be used to signal and interpret various aspects of social identity. Divided into three parts, this book explains basic sociolinguistic concepts in the light of classic approaches, as well as introducing more recent research.

This sixth edition has been revised and updated throughout, using key concepts and examples to guide the reader through this fascinating area, including:
• New material on gender, social media and online use of language, codeswitching, and language policy
• An updated companion website that is fully cross- referenced within this book and features video and audio materials and links to useful websites
• Revised examples and exercises that include new material from Asia and South America
• Fully updated further reading and references sections

An Introduction to Sociolinguistics is an essential introductory text for all students of sociolinguistics and a splendid point of reference for students of English language studies, linguistics, and applied linguistics.

The natural process of understanding speech involves combining auditory and visual cues. CNN based lip reading systems have become very popular in recent years. However, many of these systems consider lipreading to be a black box problem, with limited detailed performance analysis. In this paper, we performed transfer learning by training the Inception v3 CNN model, which has pre-trained weights produced from IMAGENET, with the GRID corpus, delivering good speech recognition results, with 0.61 precision, 0.53 recall, and 0.51 F1-score. The lip reading model was able to automatically learn pertinent features, demonstrated using visualisation, and achieve speaker-independent results comparable to human lip readers on the GRID corpus. We also identify limitations that match those of humans, therefore limiting potential deep learning performance in real world situations.

This chapter uses qualitative and quantitative analysis of interactions collected in a New Zealand rugby team to analyse the way in which pronominal choice impacts upon the social dynamics of leadership discourse. In particular, the pseudo-inclusive first person plural pronoun is examined in terms of its solidarity enhancing effect and mitigation of leadership-focused speech acts. Pronominal use is analysed with reference to the sociolinguistic concept of stance alignment and how this can mitigate potential face-threat. The discussion considers that by including themselves with the addressees of an interaction, leaders can attenuate the illocutionary force of speech acts such as directives and criticism, whilst maximising the directness of their expression, and goes on to question the social function of pseudo-inclusive compliments.