Dr Tatiana Tkacukova

Reader in Language and Law

Email:: tatiana.grieshofer@bcu.ac.uk

Dr Tatiana Grieshofer (formerly Tkacukova) is Reader in Language and Law at Birmingham City University. Tatiana’s empirically driven quantitative and qualitative research explores a wide range of language and communication related topics within family, civil, tribunal and criminal legal settings, with a specific interest on the interplay between legal and lay communication styles during pre-court and court stages of legal proceedings.

Tatiana is experienced in applying mixed methods approaches grounded in linguistics, law and social sciences (corpus linguistics, content analysis, survey and interview data, discourse analysis, ethnographic methods, conversation analysis) in order to advance the theoretical grounding across several disciplines and explore societally relevant research agenda. Her interdisciplinary research has featured across linguistics and law publishing outlets and contributed to expanding applied linguistics and socio-legal studies scholarship.

Tatiana has led a number of research projects and research programmes funded by EU Marie Curie actions, BA/Leverhulme, AHRC and ESRC schemes. The research themes explored include social justice, procedural justice, legal-lay discourse, court digitisation practices, provision of legal information and advice on social media, narrativisation and elicitation strategies in legal proceedings, the discourse of police interviews, public legal education. Tatiana’s research aims to enhance access to justice and is directly relevant to legal practice and theory as well as to the wider area of public and digital humanities.

In her research and teaching, Tatiana builds on her prior work experience of serving as court certified interpreter and translator and TEFL and ESP instructor. Tatiana regularly gives invited talks and participates in leading CPD workshops, acting as an expert evaluator of funded large scale collaborative projects, contributing to professional discussions (e.g. Transparency Projects) and acting as an external advisor (e.g. JUSTICE).

Qualifications

Memberships

Teaching

Research

Tatiana’s main research interests lie in the following areas:

Legal-lay and expert-lay communication
Access to justice and access to courts
Access to legal and procedural advice and information
Legal advice provision on social media
Procedural justice and social justice across different stages of legal proceedings
Digitisation of the justice system and government bodies
The role of the judiciary in cases with self-represented court users
Negotiation and mediation in legal settings
Applications of corpus linguistics (semi-automated textual analysis) and linguistics methods in court research and legal practice
Interpreting and translation in legal settings

Current and Recently Funded Projects

2023-2028: Developing corpus linguistics for use in family justice research

Funded by ESRC Large Grant (in collaboration with the principle investigator Professor Lauren Devine and Co-Applicants Dr Mark McGlashan and Stephen Parker)

The aim of the project is to create a suite of new corpora and draw on corpus linguistics (semi-automated textual analysis) as a methodological approach for multi-disciplinary collaborations for investigating pressing issues facing children and families in safeguarding and family justice system processes. The project has led to establishing the research centre CLASS (Corpus Linguistic Approaches to Safeguarding Studies) – a multi-site LAB at Lancaster, Aston and BCU.

As part of the project, I am leading the research programme on applications of corpus linguistics for wider access to justice topics, with the primary focus on how to support families in their journey to access the justice system and gain reliable information and advice. The research design I am working on involves a combination of corpus linguistics methods with experimental case studies and includes an exploration of AI enhanced corpus linguistics methods as well as a consideration of challenges and opportunities for court users to draw on AI generated legal support.

2019-2022: Language of DIY Justice: Communication practices & processes

Funded by AHRC Standard Grant (initially in collaboration with Prof Robert Lee, Birmingham Law School)

The project drew on quantitative and qualitative mixed methods approaches to investigate the following aspects: communication as part of procedural justice and social justice; legal-lay discourses across different stages of legal proceedings; elicitation strategies used in court forms, court users’ experiences when using digitised court services, and narrativisation procedures across different types of civil proceedings. The wide scope of the project led to the discovery of issues with the language of court forms, communication during online courts, or narrativisation procedures in legal settings. For instance, the research conducted for the project illustrated that civil and family procedure rules routinely mute participants’ voices, mismanage language data, complicate the judiciary’s role and unnecessarily delay the presentation of parties’ narratives. The project results are presented across five journal articles and the forthcoming Cambridge Element.

Focusing on adversarial legal settings, the Cambridge Element titled Legal-Lay Discourse of County and Family Courts (2024, in print) explores discursive practices in court proceedings which often involve unrepresented parties – private family proceedings and small claims cases. Such proceedings present the main caseload of county and family courts, but pose immense challenges when it comes to legal-lay communication. Drawing on court observations, alongside textual and interview data, the Element pursues three aims: (1) developing the methodological and theoretical framework for exploring discursive practices in legal settings; (2) establishing the link between legal-lay discourse and procedural justice; (3) presenting and contextualising linguistic phenomena as an inherent part of court research and practice. The Element illustrates how linguistic input can contribute to procedural changes and court reforms across different adversarial and non-adversarial legal settings. The exploration of discursive practices embedded in court processes and procedures consolidates and advances the existing court research conducted within the fields of socio-legal studies and forensic linguistics.

2019-2020: TRAC: COVID – Trust And Communication: a Coronavirus Online Visual Dashboard

Funded by AHRC UKRI COVID-19 Research and Innovation (in collaboration with the principal investigator Professor Andrew Kehoe and co-applicants Matt Gee, Dr Robert Lawson and Dr Mark McGlashan)

The project collected over 80 million tweets and applied corpus linguistics methods to visualise the conglomerated data and create a dashboard (https://traccovid.com/traccovid/). As part of the project, I led a case study on the Government management of the COVID-19 communication and public perception of the pandemic. The case study and the research findings were accepted as evidence for the report on Initial lessons from the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic released by the House of Commons, Committee of Public Accounts and the National Audit Office. The case study and the project showcase the role public humanities play in enhancing policy-making and measuring the public trust in government bodies.

2018-2019: Changing landscape of access to justice: Linguistic and socio-legal analysis of online forums for Litigants in Person

Funded by BA/Leverhulme Small Grants (in collaboration with Prof Hilary Sommerlad, Leeds Law School)

The project explored a grey area of the provision of legal advice online by analysing the quality and type of advice provided by McKenzie Friends, unregulated lay advisers who offer legal advice to court users for free or for a fee. The project showed that online forums and social media led by McKenzie Friends create a communicative environment in which the linguistic framing of the advice jeopardises its potential usefulness and creates a false sense of injustice, arguably misleading and potentially financially exploiting vulnerable users. The project also led to the discovery of common misconceptions among court users and the wider public, contributing to the research agenda of legal public education.

The project featured in professional publications and practitioner print, such as Legal Futures, The Law Society Gazette, The Times, Today’s Family Lawyer, Lawyer Monthly, Ministry of Justice Newsletter, which built on the project findings to promote the regulation of the lay advisers’ services and push for the need to provide clarity for consumers. As the only quantitative and qualitative empirical study of McKenzie Friends’ out-of-court services, the project provides a strong evidence base for reviewing the regulatory framework of the legal advice provision.

2018-2019: Aotearoa’s Future Courts: Accessibility and Accuracy in an Online Court

Funded by the New Zealand Law Foundation (in collaboration with the principal investigator Dr Bridgette Toy-Cronin, Legal Issues Centre, University of Otago, and co-applicants Dr Sally Jo Cunningham, Computer Science, University of Waikato; Dr Bridget Irvine, Law and Psychology, University of Otago; Dr David Nichols, Computer Science, University of Waikato).

2013-2015: Pro Se Language Use

Funded by EU Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship for Career Development Grant, Centre for Forensic Linguistics, Aston University

The project examined a corpus of trial transcripts from cases with litigants in person tried in England and Wales, USA and Canada. The focus was on communication challenges experienced by unrepresented litigants when conducting witness examination, delivering opening and closing arguments and discussing procedural matters with judges and legal representatives for the opposing party.

Postgraduate Supervision

Publications

Books

Grieshofer, T. (2024). Legal-Lay Discourse and Procedural Justice in Family and County Courts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi.org/10.1017/9781009378031.
Grieshofer, T. and Haworth, K. (eds.) (15 chapters from 37 contributors to be submitted by Jan 2024, edited collection to be submitted in October 2024). Communication and Legal Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chapters in books

Tkacukova, T. (2020). Forensic linguistics and language and the law. In Schmitt, N. and Rodgers, M. (eds), An Introduction to Applied Linguistics. 3^rd ed. London and New York: Routledge. 190–204.
Tkacukova, T. (data analysis and writing the chapter) and Oxburgh, G (data access). (2020). Patterns of Cooperation between Police Interviewers in Interviews with Suspected Sex Offenders. In Mason, M. and Rock, F. (eds), The Discourse of Police Interviews. Chicago: Chicago University Press. 136–155.
Tkacukova, T. (2010). Cross-examination questioning: Lay people as cross-examiners. In Coulthard, M. and Johnson, A. (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics. London and New York: Routledge. 333–346.

Articles (all peer-reviewed)

Grieshofer, T. (2023). Court forms as part of online courts: Elicitation and communication in the early stages of legal proceedings. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-023-09993-y
Grieshofer, T. (2023). Reimagining communication and elicitation strategies in private family proceedings. Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law. https://doi.org/10.1080/09649069.2023.2175546
Grieshofer, T. (2022). Remote Interpreting in Immigration Tribunals. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-022-09908-3
Grieshofer, T. (2022). The importance of being heard: Stories of unrepresented litigants in small claims cases and private family proceedings. Language and Law – Linguagem e Direito 9(1): 1–19. https://ojs.letras.up.pt/index.php/LLLD/article/view/12827
Grieshofer, T. (2022). Lay Advisers in Family Law Settings: The role and quality of advice provided on social media. Social & Legal Studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/09646639221090132
Grieshofer, T. (project lead, data collection, data analysis, writing the article) Gee, M. (contribution to data analysis) and Morton, R (contribution to data analysis). (2021). The journey to comprehensibility: court forms as the first barrier to accessing justice. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-021-09870-6
Tkacukova, T. (2020). Changing Landscape of Advice Provision: Online Forums and Social Media Run by McKenzie Friends. Child and Family Law Quarterly 4, 397–420. https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/10679/
Toy-Cronin, B. (project lead), Irvine, B., Nichols, D.M., Cunningham, S.J. and Tkacukova, T (contribution to the draft). (2018). Testing the promise of access to justice through online courts. International Journal on Online Dispute Resolution 5(1-2): 39–48. https://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/ijodr5&div=8&g_sent=1&casa_token=0NIF-8qv0_EAAAAA:DpOBieRplFj3zbqFDVzg-LRV-TuPyClgrahL1CnfxFhfjySW4SD7sKjUkujLUQYMFiy6RPdSHpI&collection=journals
Tkacukova,T. (2016). Communication in family court: Financial order proceedings from the perspective of litigants in person. Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law 38(4): 430–449. https://doi.org/10.1080/09649069.2016.1239362
Tkacukova, T. (2015). A corpus-assisted study of the discourse marker ‘well’ as an indicator of institutional roles: Professional and lay use in court cases with litigants in person. Corpora 10(2): 145–170. https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/5375/
Tkacukova, T. (2015). Litigants in person as intruders in court. Informatica e Diritto 16(1). 79–98.
Tkacukova, T. (2014). Use of quotations as a narrativisation technique during cross-examination: McDonald’s Corporation v. Helen Steel and David Morris. Explorations in Language and Law: Language and Law in Professional and Academic Settings: Analyses and Applications. vol 1. Rome: NovaLogos. 105–117.
Tkacukova, T. (2011). Lay people as cross-examiners: A linguistic analysis of the libel case McDonald's Corporation v. Helen Steel and David Morris. The International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law 17(2). 307–310.
Tkacukova, T. (2011). Building a corpus of spoken courtroom discourse. Topics in Linguistics. Nitra: Constantine the Philosopher University. 52–56.
Tkacukova, T. (2010). The power of questioning: A case study of courtroom discourse. Discourse and Interaction 3(2). Brno: Masaryk University. 49–61.
Tkachuk, T. (2008). Turn-taking management during cross-examination: Lay people as cross-examiners. Topics in Linguistics: Politeness and Interaction. Nitra: Constantine the Philosopher University. 72–77.
Tkachuk, T. (2007). Linguistic analysis of lay advocacy: Do lay people stand a chance when representing themselves in court? Proceedings of the Second European IAFL Conference on Forensic Linguistics / Language and the Law. Barcelona: University Pompeu Fabra. 239–247.

Software

Kehoe, A., Gee, M., Lawson, R., McGlashan, M., Tkacukova, T. (2021). TRAC:COVID – Trust and Communication: A Coronavirus Online Visual Dashboard. Available online at https://traccovid.com

Reports

Tkacukova, T., Kehoe, A. and Gee, M. (2021). Government management of the COVID-19 communication and public perception of the pandemic. Evidence submitted to the House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts report on Initial lessons from the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/36643/pdf/
Lee, R. (writing the report) and Tkacukova, T (data collection, data analysis). (2017). A study of litigants in person in Birmingham Civil Justice Centre. CEPLER Working Paper Series: Birmingham Law School.