April 13, 2021
A team of postgraduate students from Department of Applied Linguistics of School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University have won the second, third, and merit prizes in the 2020 Jiangsu Postgraduate Forum on Foreign Language Interdisciplinary and Academic Innovation held in Yangzhou University.
Competing against over one hundred of teams from the top universities from Jiangsu, Anhui, and Liaoning provinces in China, as the only team presenting research outcomes in English, this success marks XJTLU winning this competition for the first time.
The academic innovation forum, known as one of the most significant academic forums in the field of linguistic studies for postgraduate university students. Participating teams are required to present their latest exploration in linguistic studies and experts were invited to give comment and guidance for each team.
Focusing on analyzing the socio-biographical predictors of English learning outcome with a special concern for the rural areas in China, Ms Yue Zheng from Department of Applied Linguistics has won the second prize for her research “Are students from rural areas disadvantaged in English Learning? Evidence from The China General Social Survey (CGSS) a national survey”.
Ms Yue Zheng
“Education equality does not only simply relate to the opportunity to proper schooling, but other social-biographical predictors such as age, education level, and domicile can also play a vital role.” Said Ms Yue Zheng, “I generate a regression model to predict English learning outcomes in the hope that practical advices could be offered to improve the situation of dissimilar learning outcome between the students in the cities and in the suburbs.”
“The CGSS first launched in 2003 which aims to monitor systematically the changing relationship between social structure and quality of life in urban and rural China.” Explained by Dr Hui Yin, one of the team supervisors.
Dr Yin pointed out that CGSS is the very first nationally representative and continuous survey project in mainland China. “It is very pleased to see Ms. Zheng has produced this interesting research paper by mining the relevant data from the CGSS.”
Ms Lin Song and Ms Di Wang won the third and merit prizes respectively on “The production of Mandarin Disyllabic Tones by Ghanaian Students” and “An Investigation into Statistical Literacy among L2 Researchers in Mainland China”.
The team was supervised by Dr Yi Zhang, Dr Bin Zou, Dr Hui Yin, and Dr, Rining Wei from the Department of Applied Linguistics.
An internal assessment procedures has been applied to select the student submission before the forum. “Each submission was anonymized and independently evaluated by three faculty members of the Department of Applied Linguistics who served as judges,
“Based on the averages of the scores from three judges, we ranked the student submissions. The top three papers were recommended to the conference.” Said Dr Yin.
Dr Rining Wei, Programme Director of MA TESOL, said, “I am most pleased that our postgraduate students can have such opportunities to engage in face-to-face academic exchanges with peers and schools from other top universities.” He indicated that attending similar conferences at the provincial, national, and international levels would be a very precious kind of learning experiences to the students. He also appreciated the financial support provided by the Department of Applied Linguistics to the participating students in this event.
Ms Lin Song and other participants also realized the significance of participating in face to face academic exchanges “interacting with scholars and researchers from other top universities help me realize the competitive higher education environment,
“The two key points of studying humanities and social sciences is keep reading and innovating. It is vital to pay attention to the study of latest research literature while doing research. Innovation isn’t necessarily based on current social political trends. The suggestions given by professors play a constructive role for my later research in applied linguistic areas.”
By Ying Jiang
Photo by Dr Rining Wei
April 13, 2021