Research by former students

Chronologically ordered list of theses completed in the School.

2025

Jemima Agnew: 'Towards a Cross-Linguistic Model of Speech Rhythm Perception'

Reuben Sanderson: 'Collaborating at Work: A Multimodal Analysis of Hybrid Meetings in New Zealand'

Yining Wang: 'An investigation on formative assessment practices of EAP writing in pre-sessional courses in a New Zealand university'

Xiaohan (Christal) Guo: 'A Study of Community Interpreter Training Practices in Aotearoa New Zealand'

Carla Moriarty: " Prompting A Beautiful Young Woman: Gender Stereotypes and the Discursive Power of Image Generative AI'

Van Hong Tran: 'An investigation into English and Vietnamese technical vocabulary in Mechanical Engineering'

Joanne Hawes: 'Exploring the inclusion of Mātauranga Māori into Japanese language teaching in secondary schools in Aotearoa New Zealand: A case study of first-language Japanese teachers’ perspectives, practices, and opportunities for growth.'

Jiahan Xu: Spatial Conceptual Transfer: Evidence from English and Mandarin Chinese Speakers’ Use of the Adpositions in/li (里) and on/shang (上)'

Aimee Herubin: 'Phonetic Variation as a Function of Sexual Orientation by Rainbow Women'

2024

Angelicia Anthony Thane:  'A Critical Genre Analysis of Social Media News Reporting: The Case of Instagram'

Zhenhao Cao: 'The Fluidity of Peer Interaction and Its Associations with Writing and Revision Behaviours In L2 Collaborative Writing'

Kamal Heidari: 'The Impact of Spaced and Massed Practice on Deliberate Learning of English Opaque Idioms across L2 Proficiency Levels: A Mixed-Methods Research'

Brittany Hoback:  ‘A Sociolinguistic Study of Language Documentation: Denggan (Banam Bay, Malekula, Vanuatu)’

Yixuan Jing:  'An Ethnographically Informed Case Study of School-Based EFL Teacher Professional Development for TBLT in Rural China'

Quynh Thi Nhu Le: 'Metacognitive knowledge about vocabulary learning: A case study of an English for Academic Purposes programme'

Jiayi Li: 'EFL Teacher Professional Development in Classroom Assessment Literacy'

Priska Pramastiwi: 'The Effect of Instructed Intercultural Pragmatics on the Metapragmatic Awareness and Interactional Competence of Tertiary Indonesian EAL Learners'

Rizwan Sulehry: 'The Making of a Counter-hegemonic Discourse – The Nation, the Lawyers’ Movement, and Pakistan’s Evolving Social Arena'

Mojtaba Tadayonifar: 'Contextual Learning and Retention of Phrasal Verbs: Two Approaches to Encouraging Contextual Engagement'

Xiaopeng Xu: 'Investigating English for Medical Purposes (EMP) Coursebooks in China: Insights from Learner and Teacher Questionnaires and Coursebook Analysis'

2023

Phuong Cao:  'Teachers' Formative Assessment Practices in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Tertiary Classrooms in Vietnam: A Mixed-Methods Study'

Xin Chen: 'Morphological processing in Mandarin Chinese learners of English'

Aynur Ismayilli Karakoc: 'Designing and Validating an Integrated Reading-Writing (IRW) Test for First-year Students in the Humanities and Social Sciences in New Zealand'

Erandi Kithulgoda: 'A Multimodal Genre Analysis of Online Product Information to Inform English for Specific Purposes'

Mayyer Ling: 'Reflexive Metadiscourse in Online Academic Discussion Forums'

Nurul Aini Mohd Jelani: 'Contextual Learning of New Meanings for Familiar Word Forms from Reading and Listening to Stories'

An Pham: 'EFL Teacher Development through Teacher Research in Vietnam'

Melissa Simchowitz (Ngāti Maniapoto): 'Language practices of Māori Deaf New Zealand sign language users for identity expression'

2022

Thi Thanh Hao Dao: 'Perspectives from Task-Based Language Teaching on EFL Textbook Use: A Participatory Action Research Study at a Vietnamese University'

Lingli Du: 'Cross-Language Influences in the Processing of Multi-Word Expressions: From a First Language to Second and Back'

John Goodall (MA Thesis): ‘Critical Pedagogy in a Chinese Transnational University: Challenges and Possibilities’

Vy Lan Doan: 'The effects of mind mapping and outlining on Vietnamese EFL students' writing performance and attitudes: An explanatory sequential mixed methods study'

Kai Liu: 'Identity Construction Online: Identities and Ideologies in Reader Comments in Online News Fora'

Miriam Malthus:  ‘Actual science and poisoned people: Identity and (im)politeness on two opposed Facebook Pages about fluoridation’

Thi My Hang Nguyen: 'New Measures of Academic Collocation Knowledge: Wordlist-Based Test Development and Argument-Based Validation'

Bianca Vowell: ' Dialect Change in 'Returning' Third Culture Kids'

2021

Amy Giles-Mitson:  'The Use of Sustained Restorative Dialogue to Address Sexual Harm at the University: Examining agency in sexual harm discourse and evaluating a restorative model for prevention'

Shang Jiang: 'How does modification affect the processing of formulaic language? Evidence from L1 and L2 speakers of Chinese'

Juliet Kennedy: 'Alofa ki te tamā manu: Language, culture, identity, and wellbeing - Caring for Gagana Tokelau and lea faka-Tonga in secondary education in Aotearoa New Zealand'

Naheen Madarbakus: 'Using metacognitive strategy instruction in a TED Talks-based L2 listening programme'

Phuong Anh Nguyen: 'Written feedback in second language writing: perceptions of Vietnamese teachers and students'

Taha Omidian: 'Multiple Perspectives on Writing for Research Publication Across Academic Fields'

Dao Thi Anh Pham: 'Problems of Coherence in the Writing of Vietnamese EFL Students and an Intervention to Improve Students' Writing Performance'

Minh Ngoc Hien Ta: 'Fostering intercultural learning through project-based learning in Vietnamese tertiary EFL classes: A participatory action research study'

Wei Wei (Judy): 'The teaching and learning of listening and vocabulary in EFL classes at a Chinese university'

Apsara Wimalasiri (MA Thesis): 'Identity Negotiation of Multilingual English Language Teachers in New Zealand'

2020

Dominique Vola Ambinintsoa Razafindratsimba: 'Fostering learner autonomy in an EFL Malagasy context'

Stuart Benson: ' Vocabulary and Rugby'

Muthita (Fai) Chinpakdee: 'Developing Learner Autonomy in Language Learning: A Study In the Thai EFL Secondary School Context'

Shannon Couper: 'The power of pleasure: contributions from embodied sociolinguistics'

Trang Ngoc (Anna) Hoang: 'Novice teachers' thinking development from practicum to early career'

Paweena Jaruteerapan: 'The emerging understandings and practices of task-based language teaching (TBLT) by Thai EFL student teachers'

Hong Phuong Thao Le:  'Storytelling and teaching English to young learners: a Vietnamese case study'

Elvenna Majuddin: 'Incidental and intentional acquisition of multi-word expressions from audio-visual input: The effects of repetition and typographically enhanced captions'

Mohammed Nofal: 'Multilingual practices and identity negotiation among multilingual heritage language learners in New Zealand'

Alice Patrick:  'Māori language in English-medium primary schools: We are all in this together. He waka eke noa'

Say Phonekeo: 'Implementing a culture of thinking in Lao EFL pre-service teacher education: A case of reading'

Pansa Prommas: 'Metadiscourse in postgraduate writing'

Honiara Salanoa: 'The communicative competence of Samoan seasonal workers under the Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) scheme'

Haidee Thomson: 'Developing fluency with multi-word expressions'

Thi Ngoc Diep Tran: 'Argument-based validation of a high-stakes listening test in Vietnam'

Thi Phuong Thao Tran:  'Integrating intercultural language teaching into Vietnamese tertiary EFL classes'

Olcay Turk: 'The temporal relationships between gesture, prosody, and information structure'

Xinqing (Aileen) Wang: 'Applying cognitive linguistics to second language idiom learning'

Mengzhu Yan: 'Prosodic and syntactic focus in speech processing in Mandarin'

2019

Alexandra Birchfield: "All the people who live in Auckland”: A study of subject and non-subject relative clauses in Auckland English.

Thi Bich Thuy Bui: Promoting discovery learning of formulaic language with the aid of online resources: A classroom-based study with intermediate EFL learners.

Trang Le Diem Bui: The implementation of task-based language teaching in EFL primary school classrooms: a case study in Vietnam.

Shelley Dawson: Identities and Ideologies in Study Abroad Contexts: Negotiating Nationality, Gender, and Sexuality.

Emily Greenbank: Discursive navigation of employable identities in the narratives of former refugees.

Shih Min Loo: Investigating face-to-face and computer-mediated out-of-class collaboration in an English for Technical Writing course in Malaysia.

Iwan Munandar: The beliefs and practices of Indonesian high-school EFL teachers regarding the teaching and learning of culture and interculturality.

Tan Loc Nguyen: Enhancing pronunciation teaching in the tertiary EFL classroom: A Vietnamese case study.

Ha Thi Phuong Pham: Computer-mediated and face-to-face peer feedback in second language.

Mark Toomer: The effects of different learning conditions on the development of collocational knowledge.

Emma Wollum: The Uptalk Downgrade: comparing age- and gender-based perceptions of uptalk in four highly-skilled professions.

2018

Jacqueline Iseli: Deaf Ni-Vanuatu and their signs: a sociolinguistic study of an emerging sign language in Vanuatu.

Cailing Lu: Investigating knowledge and use of technical vocabulary in Traditional Chinese Medicine.

Rania Za'rour: The acquisition of variation: Arab Migrants' acquisition of (ING) and Coronal Stop Deletion in Wellington.

2017

Oliver Ballance: An experimental design perspective on the affordances of concordances: Exploring the affordances of concordances from a language learning perspective.

TJ Boutorwick: Productive vocabulary and extensive reading.

Thi Ngoc Yen Dang: Investigating vocabulary in academic spoken English: Corpora, teachers, and learners.

Evan Hazenberg: The practice of identity: gender and performativity in New Zealand and Canadian English.

Myq Larsen: Thresholds, Text Coverage, Vocabulary Size, and Reading Comprehension in Applied Linguistics.

Pakjira Leelertphan: A comparison of genre and discourse of Thai and New Zealand hotel home pages.

Shota Mukai: Needs analysis for the development of academic speech skills.

Douglas Meyer: Testing English as an international language.

Chi Duc Nguyen: Fostering incidental vocabulary uptake from audio-visual materials: The role of text comprehension.

Neda Salahshour: Discourse & mediation: a critical discourse analysis of immigrant representation.

Kaitlyn Smith: Children of Deaf Adults (CODA) as heritage signers: a linguistic analysis of the NZSL production of bimodal bilingual children.

Brian Strong: Evaluating phrasal verb exercises: An investigation into the effectiveness of error-free and trial-and-error learning

Ayman Tawalbeh: Pre and Post Migration: Identity, Language Use and Attitudes among the Wellington Iraqi Community.

Lauren Whitty: A corpus-based study of English modal auxiliaries using the British National Corpus, with a focus on a classroom and learner coursebook series.

Anik Wulyani: Teacher Professional Development (TPD) among EFL teachers in Indonesia.

Mireille (Micky) Vale: Folk definitions as a model for sign language dictionary definitions: a user-focused study of the Online Dictionary of New Zealand Sign Language.

2016

George Aberi: Intertextuality in Kenyan Policy Discourse on the Rights of Women.

Matthew Book: Validating the English Language Exam for university entry in Shanghai, China.

Deborah Chua: Comparative alternation in y-adjectives.

Khadijeh Gharibi: Incomplete Acquisition, Attrition and Maintenance of Heritage Speakers' Family Language: Iranians in New Zealand.

Amy Giles-Mitson: Address terms in New Zealand English: Tracking changes to the social indexicality of gendered terms of address.

Ruth Graham: Withdraw and Apologise: A Diachronic Study of Unparliamentary Language in the New Zealand Parliament, 1890-1950.

Diego Navarro: Language learner cognition: Exploring adult migrants’ L2 activity beyond the classroom.

Thi Huynh Loc Nguyen: Development of Vietnamese Pre-service EFL Teachers' Assessment Literacy.

Marty Pilott: Migrant Pronunciation: What do Employers find Acceptable?

Fenty Siregar: In pursuit of intercultural communicative competence: An investigation into English language policy and practices at a private university in Indonesia.

Rebecca Siu: Sociolinguistic variation in Hong Kong Sign Language.