UoL MA student wins British Council Commendation for ”innovative" and "thought-provoking” dissertation
MA Applied Linguistics & TESOL student Cleon St Paul has received a Commendation in this year’s British Council Master’s in English Language Teaching Dissertation Awards for her Dissertation “West Indian Literature: a useful resource for English Language Teaching?"
Her research explores teachers’ attitudes towards the use of West Indian literature in the EFL/ESL classroom via their evaluation of a corpus-informed lesson plan employing a West Indian poem. She asked teachers from the UK, Spain, Somalia, China, Grenada and Columbia to evaluate the lesson and text in terms of its potential usability, potential to develop cultural awareness, linguistic usefulness and overall teachability. Overall, the study shows that literature from outside the traditional UK/US canon has the potential to be useful for teaching in a wide range of contexts and gives a model for how teachers might evaluate a text using corpus analysis and then develop that into a lesson procedure.
Cleon's dissertation was in competition with MA dissertations from other UK HEI institutions and clearly was found to have the potential for impact on English language teaching policy and practice. This is the seventh year in a row where an MA Applied Linguistics and TESOL dissertation by a Liverpool student has received a British Council commendation or special commendation. The MA dissertation requires students to conduct independent research where they collect and analyse their own primary data in relation to research questions developed from detailed reviews of secondary literature.
Cleon said that "through my own learning experiences of developing my first language from renowned Caribbean literary works by Merle Collins, Martin Carter, Kamau Brathwaite, Derek Walcott and H.D Carberry, materialised the idea of using these works to help second language learners develop their language skills. My experience in English language education and Caribbean literature coupled with my MA Applied Linguistics and TESOL modules were the groundings for this research. By embarking on this study, I aimed to add my West Indian voice to the discourse on the decentralisation of ELT materials as it became quite evident throughout my studies that there is a disproportionate representation of materials from former British colonies whose mother tongues emerged as “English” and “Creole”. I hoped to contribute a study towards the further diversification efforts and address the research gap by focusing my dissertation on investigating teachers' perceptions on the use of West Indian Literature as a potential tool to teach lexis and vocabulary in ELT."
Dr David Oakey, Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Liverpool and leader of the Applied Linguistics and TESOL MA programmes, said:
“This award is well-deserved recognition of Cleon's excellent work, and her success demonstrates, once again, that University of Liverpool MA Applied Linguistics and TESOL students conduct outstanding research with potential for impact on English language teaching both in their home teaching contexts and further afield. Congratulations to Cleon and her supervisor, Dr Christian Jones!”