Graduate Researcher Series: an interview with Shengkai Yin

Juerong Qiu

Shengkai Yin is a doctoral student at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) and the University of Melbourne. He is one of the Duolingo Dissertation Award (2022) winners. His research focuses on assessing critical thinking (CT) in EAP (English for Academic Purposes) speaking.

Juerong interviewed Shangkai about his doctoral research and his PhD journey.

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First, congratulations on winning the Duolingo Dissertation Award! What advice would you give to cohorts who consider applying for it?

It’s really a surprise for me to receive this award. For advice, I can share some tips when I was preparing for the application. First things first, do read the announcement carefully, line by line, cos there are always basic requirements for the applicants. Circle the important information, including topics of interests, materials to submit, and the deadline. After that, consult your supervisor and weigh costs and gains. When you are preparing the proposal, don’t hesitate to resort to advice from your supervisor, colleagues and friends. Revision is always the golden rule in drafting a proposal. Finally, check all the materials and click the button to submit!

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I’m wondering if you could tell us why you choose to do a joint PhD. Are you planning to visit Melbourne anytime soon?

I am planning to travel to Melbourne soon in 2023. Actually, this is a joint PhD-degree program with paired seed funding between Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) and the University of Melbourne (UoM). There are a couple of pairs from other faculties involved in this program. It’s a great opportunity for me to learn from both sides.

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How does the joint PhD program work at the two universities?

So here I would like to express my sincere thanks to my supervisors at the two universities. My supervisor at SJTU is Professor Jin Yan, who encouraged me to apply to the joint PhD program and provided me with unconditional help in writing the proposal. I admire her relentless work ethic, focus, drive and discipline, and I feel extremely fortunate to have her.  My principal supervisor at UoM is Dr. Jason Fan, who is always available to discuss with me, guide me and encourage me to delve deeper into the concepts. His professionalism and enthusiasm in the field of language assessment have been enlightening me to excel in myself. My co-supervisor at UoM is Associate Professor Ute Knoch, who is the expert model that I wish I could become someday in my academic career.

Currently, given the pandemic, we organize the supervision meeting online fortnightly. So for this program, I have to meet the requirements from both universities in order to get the degrees from both of them. For instance, for SJTU I have to publish two articles from the listed top journals; and for UoM, I have to accomplish several milestones. It is a big challenge for me but I do enjoy the whole process.

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What’s your research topic and how did you come to it?

My research is about assessing critical thinking (CT) in EAP speaking through designing and validating a rating scale. This actually originated from my teaching reflection. I was a part-time TOEFL speaking instructor since college, I found that most of the young students especially from international schools performed well in terms of the aspects of CAF, that is, Complexity, Accuracy, and Fluency features. However, when I delved deeper into their speech, I detected some issues about the meaning-related aspects, for example, redundant information, illogical sentences, superficial ideas, etc. The higher-order thinking skills such as critical thinking might also come into play in students’ speaking performance. Luckily, this idea was confirmed by my supervisors and they encourage me to conduct more research on it.

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What’s the significance of your research?

This study will make contributions to the field of EAP speaking assessment in several aspects. First, this study is one of the few attempts to develop a CT rating scale in the context of an EAP speaking assessment. Second, this study provides insights into CT and its role in academic English-speaking ability. The intended results can provide useful guidance in EAP speaking task design, rating scale development and retrofitting. Finally, this study provides pedagogical implications for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers to adopt CT-oriented activities in their teaching practices, and to evaluate CT in language classes.

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Could you tell us how you select your research participants?

For this study, experts and raters are two important sources of scale constructs.  Currently, I’m working on recruiting raters and inviting senior experts on critical thinking and EAP speaking. The criteria for selecting potential raters are: (1) they have taught in Chinese tertiary education sectors, (2) they have experience in marking The College English Test; this test examines the English proficiency of undergraduate and postgraduate students in China.  

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Are there any interesting findings that you’d like to share with us?

Till now, drawing on the literature and domain experts’ perceptions, I propose a CT framework for EAP speaking assessment.The proposed CT assessment framework defines the key CT components situated in a specific context, shedding light on how CT is conceptualized in EAP speaking context. I hope this framework can guide my further data collection and the process of construct validation.

Thank you for sharing with us your research project and PhD journey!

Thank you, Juerong.