PhD

Topic

PhD Candidate

Loredana Pungă, Dr. Habil., Prof. – 2020-2021

Madalina Chitez, Dr. Habil., Senior Researcher (Assoc. Prof.)

– 2021 - ongoing

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The first research objective of my Ph.D. is to gain understanding of how L1 Romanian students of English use academic phraseology in BA thesis writing. The learner corpus used for this research inquiry is a sub-set of the Romanian Genre Corpus / ROGER (Chitez et al., 2021). The second objective of my thesis is to design a platform, called Tezapp, which offers academic writing support for thesis writing in English by L1 Romanian students. The results emerging from the ROGER corpus analysis will inform several of Tezapp’s functionalities, while the other functionalities will integrate various corpus-based academic writing support features identified by previous research (e.g. phrasebank, integration of expert academic corpus).

Brief presentation of the thesis

Applied result of the thesis

Source:

Dinca, A & Chitez, M. (2021). Assessing learners’ academic phraseology in the digital age: a corpus-informed approach to ESP texts. The Journal of Teaching English for Specific and Academic Purposes, 9(1), 71-84.

Available at: http://espeap.junis.ni.ac.rs/index.php/espeap/article/view/1093/512.

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Topic

PhD Candidate

Thesis Supervisor

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My thesis is based on the compilation of a learner English corpus consisting of essays written by Romanian high school students. The main tool used in carrying out the corpus analysis is the #LancsBox software package. Over the years, the literature of second and foreign language writing research has suggested different approaches to teaching academic writing. The traditional approach to L2 writing took the form of controlled compositions, which means writing grammatically correct sentences, based on given patterns. This type of writing was meant to focus on students’ reaching a high level of accuracy in their written work, mainly by imitation. Nevertheless, the paradigms needed to change in order to accommodate the various deliberate functions of language. Thus, the focus has shifted from sentence-level accuracy to macro-level communicative purposes. Students should always be aware that they do not write merely because their teachers ask them to do so, but because through their writing, they are able to fulfil a certain real-life social function.

Brief presentation

Applied result of the thesis

Source:

Manda, I. & Chitez, M. (2022). Writing Culture Clash: English Essay Writing Challenges in Romanian Pre-University Settings. In Conference Proceedings - 12th International Conference Future of Education, 30 June - 1 July 2022, Florence, Italy, Vol. 12, Filodiritto Editore, pp. 403-409.

Available at: https://conference.pixel-online.net/FOE/files/foe/ed0012/FP/7862-LANG5586-FP-FOE12.pdf.

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