Discourse and Communication

The Discourse and Communication group uses a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods to conduct both fundamental and applied research on language and communication. This research is often situated in a societally relevant context and contributes strongly to the research themes Healthy Ageing and Sustainable Society.

Fundamental research is done on persuasive communication, argumentation, style and discourse characteristics, multimodal communication, language and social interaction, writing processes, and language learning and teaching processes. Applied research is concerned with the design and optimization of communication products, the informational, instructional, or persuasive effects of these communication products, the development of communication skills, and the way these skills are taught in primary, secondary and tertiary education and trained in the workplace.

Communication is investigated in professional settings such as health care (persuasive health campaigns, doctor-patient interactions, interactions between health professionals), multimodal instructions (text-based documents, comics, videos), and education (teacher-student and student-student interaction and teaching and learning of communication skills), but also in private organisations (interaction during meetings) and in the public sphere (persuasive effects of advertisements, campaigns on sustainability).

The group has recently attracted new staff, publishes a healthy number of research papers and is successful in grant applications (this year: NWO VENI -Declercq, NWO PhD in the Humanities - Hoeks & Ongena). There is an ongoing collaboration with a wide variety of academic and societal partners (e.g., University Medical Hospital (UMCG), the University Teacher Training Institute and secondary schools in the region.