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The Editor and Board of Language Teaching are pleased to announce that there were two tied winners of the 2011 Christopher Brumfit thesis award: Dr Cecilia Guanfang Zhao and Dr Catherine van Beuningen. Both theses were selected by an external panel of judges on the basis of their significance to the field of second language acquisition, second or foreign language learning and teaching, as well as their originality, creativity and quality of presentation.
Dr Guanfang Zhao's Ph.D. thesis was entitled The role of voice in high-stakes second language writing assessment. Using a mixed-method approach, this study developed and validated an analytic voice rubric, and formally investigated the relationship between voice and writing quality in the context of a high-stakes L2 writing assessment. Results from the study offered an alternative conceptualization of voice and showed that overall voice strength was a statistically significant predictor of L2 argumentative writing quality.
The external referees remarked of the thesis that it ‘. . .displays an excellent capacity for independent research and shows distinctive flair and originality in exploring a relatively under-researched area to date’.
Dr Guanfang Zhao completed her dissertation at New York University under the supervision of Professor Lorena Llosa.
Dr van Beuningen submitted a thesis on The effectiveness of comprehensive corrective feedback in second language writing at the University of Amsterdam, supervised by Dr Folkert Kuiken and Dr Nivja de Jong. She explored the value of corrective feedback as a revising tool as well as its capacity to support long-term accuracy development. Her results showed that comprehensive corrective feedback led to improved accuracy, compared to what was gained from self-editing or writing practice. Only direct corrective feedback was found to improve grammatical accuracy, whereas students’ nongrammatical accuracy benefited most from indirect corrective feedback.
The external referees remarked of the thesis that it ‘represents an original, important and substantive contribution to research on the effects of comprehensive corrective feedback in L2 writing. . .a series of separate and internally coherent studies that together effectively address the same theoretical and empirical questions in a scientifically engaging and compelling manner’.
This year's runner-up was Dr Rebecca Sachs, whose Ph.D. thesis, Individual differences and the effectiveness of visual feedback on reflexive binding in L2 Japanese, was presented at Georgetown University under the supervision of Professor Alison Mackey. The study examines how the effectiveness of different feedback techniques is related to individual differences among learners. In a computer-mediated experiment with a pre-/post-/delayed-post-test design, 80 L2 Japanese learners, randomly assigned into three treatment conditions, practised interpreting sentences containing the reflexive zibun (‘self’). Some received feedback regarding the correctness of their interpretations, others were also shown visual diagrams of the relevant linguistic structures, and others received no feedback. Several aspects of aptitude were measured, including grammatical sensitivity, visual memory, metalinguistic knowledge and sensitivity to ambiguity.
Dr Sachs's study was singled out for praise as ‘an exceptional thesis, which clearly involved an immense amount of work in its conceptualization, implementation and analysis’.
