MA in Applied Linguistics and ELT – Berlin
Recent Dissertation Topics
The tutors at St Mary's encourage the MA students to choose a dissertation topic relevant to their special interests. They can cover a very wide range of subject areas such as language acquisition, language teaching, sociolinguistics, evaluation, testing and teacher training.
A selection of recent dissertation titles:
- The relationship between musical ability and foreign language aptitude
- The ‘Inner Circle’ native-speaker model for English as a foreign language
- The provision of English as an Additional Language in the English educational system
- Comparing attitudes in Poland towards English and the languages of neighbouring countries.
- A case study of the Technical English curriculum at the Al-Aroub Palestinian Technical College
- Aptitude and working memory: cognitive profiles
- A longitudinal case study of a six-year-old girl with language delay
- An examination of the English produced by two bilingual children: code-switching and language interference
- An investigation into why so few immigrant children in Germany succeed at school, with particular reference to the Turkish community
- Attitudes towards Standard English in education, following the publication of the National Curriculum for England and Wales.
- The performance of native and non-native speakers on the Cambridge Proficiency Use of English test.
- Native and non-native speakers in official English environments: a comparative study of attitudes and perceptions in NATO and DHL.
- Language classroom observation in Chinese secondary schools.
- A critical overview of the use of real books in teaching English to young learners.
- Politeness strategies in Polish and English: a cross-cultural search for Universals.
- An examination of the use of regional dialect in the East Midlands towns of Mansfield and Newark at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
- Testing the C-test: an investigative overview of a modification of the cloze procedure.
- The use of corpora in authentic classroom materials.
- "Why French?" A study of foreign language teaching in Britain's schools.
- In defence of the Black American identity: Exploring the ebonics debate in terms of language, culture and identity.
- A case study of Japanese-English bilingual language development.
- The use of real books as a precursor to the Scottish Storyline methodology for teaching English to young learners, with specific reference the primary schools in Nord Rhein Westphalia, Germany.
- Transition from Received Pronunciation to Estuary English.
- Memory for language learning: the process of L2 orthographic retention and recall.
- An empirical study into the use of elderspeak by carers to institutionalised adults: who cares?
- Lexical chunking and language acquisition theory: implications for English language teaching.
- The poor language learner in Columbia.
- Prejudice and the perception of accent: Giles 1970 revisited.
- Key aspects of the management of a business English training department.
- National language(s) and language in education: a case for Sierra Leone.
- An investigation into the role of implicit and explicit teaching in second language acquisition: the case for consciousness raising.
- The place of pragmatics in English language teaching.
- The relationship between action research and the professional development of English language teachers: a critique of current trends.
