The Editor and Board of Language Teaching are pleased to announce that the winner of the 2012 Christopher Brumfit thesis award is Dr Jim Ranalli. The thesis was selected by an external panel of judges based on its significance to the field of second language acquisition, second or foreign language learning and teaching, originality and creativity and quality of presentation.
Dr. Ranalli's Ph.D. thesis was entitled The VVT Project: A web-based platform for strategy instruction and research into self-regulated learning in L2 vocabulary. The focus of this thesis is a web-based second language (L2) instructional resource called VVT (Virtual Vocabulary Trainer) designed to teach integrated vocabulary depth of knowledge and dictionary referencing skills to tertiary-level learners of English as a Second Language. The findings provide evidence of the feasibility of automated, online strategy instruction for complementing teacher-led forms, while also shedding light on the challenges many L2 learners face in self-directed learning of vocabulary depth of knowledge. The thesis also demonstrates the potential of an integrative, multicomponential model of self-regulation for researching and theorising about L2 learning. The external referees remarked of the thesis that ‘the candidate succeeds well in framing the research problem and situating the study in both the research literature and real-world challenges of developing proficiency in vocabulary. Moreover, he provides a cutting-edge treatment of the potential and possible constraints of virtual environments as part of the research problem. . .and presents the work in a highly accessible and coherent writing style’.
Dr. Ranalli completed his thesis at Iowa State University, USA under the supervision of Professors Volker Hegelheimer and Carol Chapelle.
This year's runner-up was Dr Anke Lenzing with a thesis entitled The development of the grammatical system in early second language acquisition at the University of Paderborn, Germany and supervised by Professor Manfred Pienemann. The study focuses on an explanatory account of the mental grammatical system and its development in early L2 learners of English. In order to account for both syntactically and semantically ill-formed utterances produced by these learners, she proposes specific hypotheses concerning the early L2 grammatical system which are based on Lexical-Functional Grammar and Processability Theory.
The examiners remarked that it is ‘a highly impressive thesis which advances our understanding of children's early L2 development at primary school. The findings deserve to be taken seriously and made available in suitable ways for a wide readership that goes well beyond the specific community of SLA researchers. The detailed argument is developed with exemplary clarity. The way in which the thesis is structured makes it easy for the reader to find their way about, and data are presented in a very user-friendly manner’.
