Dr Sarah Cox
Sarah Cox is an Affiliate Researcher who has worked in English Language Teaching as a manager and teacher for over twenty years in ESOL contexts in the UK and in contexts where English is a Foreign Language in Japan, Germany and Cambodia. She has worked with refugees and asylum seekers in Glasgow for the past fifteen years and completed her PhD in Language Ecologies with the UNESCO Chair in 2021.
Sarah’s PhD research was an interdisciplinary study drawing on applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, human geography, intercultural communication and anthropology to explore the gap between policy, practice and academic literature within language learning for refugees in Scotland. Her research focused on the development of an ecological, multilingual approach to language learning by working collaboratively with women who had recently arrived in Glasgow through the British Red Cross Family Reunion Integration Service. Sarah is interested in multilingual, decolonising approaches to language teaching and within her PhD she aimed to decentre her position and reduce the status of English by participating as learner of her participants’ languages to shift power dynamics and increase the participants’ feelings of empowerment. Sarah’s thesis also included two smaller case studies in Wales and Germany to compare support for language learning for refugees in each of these ecologies.
Sarah’s research interests are multilingualism, decolonising, language ecologies, translanguaging, language policy and refugee integration.
List of publications
Cox, S., Phipps, A. and Hirsu, L. (2022) Language learning for refugee women in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic: restorative pedagogies for integrating to place—Perspectives from Scotland. Frontiers in Communication, 7, 982813. (doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2022.982813)
Cox, S. and Phipps, A. (2022) An ecological, multilingual approach to language learning with newly reunited refugee families in Scotland. Journal of Educational Research, 115, 101967. (doi: 10.1016/j.ijer.2022.101967)
Cox, S. (2022) Supporting refugee families in Scotland through an ecological, multilingual approach to language learning. Language Learning of Adult Migrants in Europe edited by David Mallows and Glenn Levine. Springer. (DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-79237-4_9)
Cox, S. (2021). 'You and me, we're the same. You struggle with Tigrinya and I struggle with English.' An exploration of an ecological, multilingual approach to language learning with New Scots (Doctoral dissertation, University of Glasgow)
Cox, S. (2020). Can an ecological, multilingual approach help us to better support reunited refugee families in Scotland with language learning? Theory and Practice of Second Language Acquisition, 6(2), 11-34.