LALS PhD graduand Thi Ngoc Yen Dang awarded best PhD thesis of 2017 by ALANZ
LALS PhD graduand Thi Ngoc Yen Dang has been awarded the prize for best PhD thesis of 2017 by the Applied Linguistics Association of New Zealand (ALANZ).
Yen's PhD thesis, entitled ‘Investigating vocabulary in academic spoken English: Corpora, teachers, and learners’, was identified as making a significant and original contribution to the field of applied linguistics.
The judges commented that "the PhD contributes to our knowledge and understanding of vocabulary in academic speech, an area that has been under-researched in studies on vocabulary and corpora. Key contributions of the PhD are the creation of the ASWL according to learner levels and the methodology around the creation and validation of word lists. An important finding is that while high-frequency vocabulary does vary across disciplines, a common core vocabulary exists across disciplines. The PhD has important pedagogical implications for learners, teachers and course developers, and signals useful areas for further research in the area of academic spoken vocabulary.”
Yen's supervisors were Associate Professor Averil Coxhead and Professor Stuart Webb.
Yen will soon take up a lecturing position at Leeds University.