We are delighted to announce that Aki Siegel (Rikkyo University) successfully passed her PhD viva last week with (very) minor corrections!
Having completed her MA at University of Hawai’i at Manoa, Aki enrolled as a long-distance part-time student in ECLS, working with Paul Seedhouse as her supervisor (and later adding Adam Brandt as second supervisor).
Her PhD thesis, ‘Longitudinal Development of Word Search Sequences in English as a Lingua Franca Interactions‘, examines interaction between international students in a university dorm in Japan, and brings together the research areas of ELF, conversation analysis and complex adaptive systems to examine language development over time. Her research was praised by her examiners, Salla Kurhila (University of Helsinki) and Alan Firth.
Congratulations Dr Aki!