PhD

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PhD Candidate

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

– 2021 - ongoing

Thesis Supervisors

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The aim of my thesis is twofold. I first seek to identify problematic areas in the use of English academic phraseology in texts produced by Romanian university students. Then, the findings of this study will be used to conceptualize a web-based tool which will offer phraseology support for academic writing in English for L1 Romanian students.

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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 August 2022-May 2023

Advisor: Dr. Elena Cotos

My research stay at Iowa State University (ISU) was a wonderful opportunity to work with outstanding scholars from the field of Applied Linguistics. At a personal level, it gave me the chance to experience life in the U.S.A., and to meet people from all over the world.

While at ISU, I completed and published a book review in the English for Specific Purposes Journal under the guidance of Dr. Elena Cotos. I also conducted an extensive literature review for my PhD project and tested several corpus extraction procedures.

ISU offered excellent academic development opportunities as well. I audited two classes in the Applied Linguistics and Technology PhD programme: English for Specific Purposes & Corpus Linguistics and Language Teaching. In addition, attended various workshops, such as Public Speaking and Interpersonal Communication seminars.

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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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 Thesis Coordinator

In my thesis, I am taking a telecinematic stylistic approach to a specialized corpus of workplace sitcoms. There have been some corpus-based incursions into sitcoms, but most telecinematic stylistics studies focus on dramas or other “serious” genres of TV and cinema. To fill this knowledge gap through my project, I have three main goals:

(a) Create a representative corpus (WITS) for the subgenre workplace sitcoms, a dataset comprised of transcripts of dialogue lines in multiple workplace sitcoms, all contemporary American productions which reflect current varieties of American English.

(b) Identify and analyze the most salient linguistic and extralinguistic features of the WITS corpus from a mixed multimodal perspective. A central part of the analysis will be dedicated to linguistic complexity features.

(c) Propose a series of educational activities based on the WITS corpus for upper high school and college-level students of EFL.

To sum up, my study uses corpus linguistics methods to analyze complexity features in the WITS corpus and design a corpus-based proficiency-adapted platform for EFL teaching activities.

Bleeped characters in The Office (OFF-WITS subcorpus)

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Topic

PhD Student

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

Thesis Coordinator

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My study aims at obtaining results that can be used for the creation of an intelligent simplification platform that generates simplified versions of literary texts in both English and Romanian, across three levels of text complexity: beginner, intermediate and advanced. In addition to the automatic simplification option, the platform will also include a bilingual digital text repository with simplified excerpts from texts in both British/American literature and Romanian literature. For Romanian literature, I plan to select excerpts from works in the middle and high school curriculum, followed by exercises to deepen textual understanding. The same structure will be applied to the section dealing with texts written in English. Considering that titles from British or American literature are not included in the school curriculum anymore, this platform can play an important role culturally and didactically by providing free access to British and American literature adapted for various groups of the school population.

Brief presentation of the thesis

The creation of an automated simplification platform for use in school educational settings.

Applied result of the thesis

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