PGR Network

PGR Network

The UKALTA PGR (Postgraduate Researcher) Network aims to bring together UKALTA members who are in the process of completing their master’s or doctoral studies in language testing, as well as early-career researchers (ECRs) who have completed their studies within the past five years. PGR Network’s aims and objectives are:

  1. to offer an accessible opportunity for UKALTA PG and ECR members to network.
  2. to further build an online and face-to-face community of practice of UKALTA PG and ECR members.
  3. to support the language testing research community and new and emerging researchers working in the field of language testing.
  4. to encourage greater partnership between postgraduate students and early-career researchers to exchange information and research as well as to encourage discussions on language assessment on a broad range of languages in the UK.

*At present, activities are being conducted through the Microsoft Teams online platform, but in future, we envisage offering both online Microsoft Teams-based events and face-to-face events. Go to the PGR Network Events page for details of upcoming plans.

To join the UKALTA PGR Network and the Microsoft Teams area, please fill in this brief survey. We also request that you Join UKALTA first.

UKALTA PGR Network steering group members 2021-2022:

Camilo Ramos Gálvez, PhD student in Applied Linguistics at the Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University.

 

Camilo’s PhD research investigates the diagnosis of academic reading in English as a foreign language. Through his study, Camilo seeks to develop and validate innovative item types for a new diagnostic assessment tool for academic reading. By deepening our understanding of what it means to diagnose higher-level academic reading abilities in EFL contexts, Camilo hopes to make the case for a more purposeful use of diagnostic assessments.
Katherine Halley, PhD student at CRELLA, University of Bedfordshire.

 

Katie’s PhD investigates teacher and students’ interactional competence (IC) in digital higher education (HE) English as a medium of instruction (EMI) classes in Japan and Malaysia. With the advances of using online spaces due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Katie’s study will particularly address the required non-verbal, multimodal, and semiotic modes of IC in HE digital EMI classes.
Santi B. Lestari, PhD student at the Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University

Santi’s PhD research investigates the scoring of integrated reading-into-writing performance using analytic rating scales. More specifically, she looks at how the reading and source use-related aspects of the performance are evaluated by raters using two different analytic rating scales.
 

 

Shishi Zhang, PhD student at IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society, University College London.

 

Shishi’s PhD research is on assessing second language pragmatic competence for intercultural communication. Her research interests include test development, second language pragmatics, assessing pragmatic competence, and intercultural communication.

Johnathan Jones, PhD candidate at the UCL Institute of Education, University College London 

 

Johnathan investigates the efficacy of traditional listening prompts used in L2 speech perception testing, comparing isolated words with connected speech. Though his academic work examines theoretical and methodological gaps in research and assessment, his interests are practical, refining assessments to better reflect language learners’ present abilities.