PhD candidate Thu Nguyen wins TESOL Award for a presentation at TESOL 2019

The presentation Strategies for effective communication in English as a lingua franca by PhD candidate Thu Nguyen and her supervisor, Professor Lynda Yates, has received a 2019 Award for International Participation at the TESOL International Convention & English Language Expo to be held in Atlanta, Georgia, the USA from 12-15 March. The paper is a report on part of Thu’s PhD study on international students’ use of and perspectives on communication strategies (CSs) in academic English as a lingua franca (ELF). The award of US$2500 will help her cover expenses related to attending the TESOL Conference.

Thu and Lynda will also be presenting another related paper at the 2019 AAAL (American Association for Applied Linguistics) Conference, also in Atlanta prior to the TESOL Convention. The research proposes a new function-based taxonomy of CSs, which can fully describe the dynamic interaction in academic ELF among international students and their peers in higher education in Australia, thus contributing to the knowledge base of research on ELF pragmatics and communication.This knowledge will have the potential to be translated to an ELF pedagogy with a focus on the development of learners’ abilities to use language in a multicultural or multilingual English-speaking environment.