Zoom webinar, to receive the link or for more information please contact Dr N Fancourt (nigel.fancourt@education.ox.ac.uk)
Zoom webinar, to receive the link or for more information please contact Dr N Fancourt (nigel.fancourt@education.ox.ac.uk)
Zoom webinar, to receive the link or for more information please contact Dr N Fancourt (nigel.fancourt@education.ox.ac.uk)
Zoom webinar, to receive the link or for more information please contact Dr N Fancourt (nigel.fancourt@education.ox.ac.uk)
Renyu completed her BA degree in Psychology at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada) and her MPhil degree in Education at University of Cambridge.
During her MPhil study, she worked with children aged 4 to 6 years to investigate the relationship between bilingualism, vocabulary size, and inhibitory control, and also to validate a novel app designed to assess early language development. For her Dphil study at Oxford, Renyu aims to explore the factors that might affect L2 pronunciation learning in young children and the interaction between children’s L1 and L2. She is particularly interested in the psychological factors that might influence a child’s L2 pronunciation.
Prior to studying at Oxford, Renyu worked as Research Assistant at the Assessment Research Group at British Council for one year and a half. She was involved in various projects, including gap analysis on reading demand and reading ability, participant feedback questionnaire design and analysis, design and recruitment for a new EAP task study, etc.
Abbey is a Probationary Research Student in the Department of Education, in collaboration with the Department of Engineering.
Before joining the DPhil program, Abbey obtained a B.A. in Applied Linguistics with minors in Russian and Chinese from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an MSc in Applied Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition from the University of Oxford. She was the recipient of a Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship through U.S. Department of State for study in Russia and was awarded two Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships for study in both Russia and China. She holds both TESOL and TEFL certificates and has taught English as a Second Language in various contexts to a wide variety of learner populations.
Abbey’s main research interests lie in the use of technology to facilitate language learning. Her DPhil research focuses on the development of a virtual reality program to bridge the gaps that students face when learning languages through distance learning.
Fang Xu is a doctoral student in education at University of Oxford. Her research interests are in equity, social class and socioeconomic status gaps in educational outcomes. Her research is motivated by a theoretical interest in the production and reproduction of social inequalities.
She aims to use empirical data and longitudinal datasets to understand how youth developmental outcomes are shaped by families with a particular focus on populations in the Greater China region. She is also interested in the role of individual decision-making mechanisms in shaping educational inequality by social origins and school segregation, comparative studies of education system characteristics, and big data and machine learning in education.
Fang Xu obtained her BA degree in Chinese Language and Literature (Teacher Education) at South China Normal University. During her undergraduate study, she was selected into the Class of Sinology and obtained the qualification certificate for teachers in senior high school Chinese teaching in China. She completed her MA degree in Sociology of Education at the Institute of Education, University College London in 2019, conducting quantitative research on adolescents’ educational aspirations in China for her dissertation. Prior to her DPhil study, she worked as a research assistant at Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society (AIRS) at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen.
Szilvi’s main research interest lies in student religiosity. She completed her BA in Theology in Budapest (summa cum laude). After working in a number of ministry and teaching settings, she completed her PGCE in Religious Education at the Department, followed by an MSc in Research Design and Methodology (distinction).
She has been working as a project manager on a large-scale science-religion project at the University of Oxford before starting her DPhil. Szilvi lives in Oxford with her husband and 3 children.