Research

I am currently working on my doctoral research project, entitled "Reevaluating the teaching of English for international communication". This action research study explores the implications of research in the applied linguistics field of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) for classroom English language teaching (ELT). At the heart of the study is a pilot course held at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern, Germany, during the summer semester of 2013. This semester-long course was designed to focus on those features of English which had been identified as particularly important for successful communication in ELF settings, including pronunciation, intercultural communicative competence, pragmatic awareness and communicative strategies and awareness-raising about the sociolinguistic situation of English in the world today. Data collected during this course includes a linguistic corpus of ca. 185,000 words comprising a transcription of each of the ten course session and the oral final exams, as well as annotated lesson plans, journal entries about each course session documenting, e.g. the effectiveness of tasks and materials used in the course, materials (both pre-existing, e.g. textbooks, and those I developed myself) used in the course and student evaluations of the course.