SOLL Researchers Win Duolingo Dissertation Award

Catherine Roberts

Recently, three PhD students at SOLL have won the Duolingo English Test Doctoral Dissertation Award — Rena Gao, Shengkai Yin, and Niles Zhao. 


Rena Gao is supervised by Professor Carsten Roever and Professor Trevor Cohn. Her PhD research is developing a language prediction model that will help understand how studying overseas changes L2 English speaker communication.

Shengkai Yin is a joint-PhD student at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (STJU) and the University of Melbourne (UoM). His supervisors are Professor Yan Jin (SJTU), Associate Professor Jason Fan (UoM) and Professor Ute Knoch (UoM). His doctoral research looks at the assessment of critical thinking in English for Academic Purposes speaking. 

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Niles Zhao is our blog’s first production team lead. His doctoral project, supervised by Associate Professor Jason Fan and Dr Kellie Frost, investigates the impact of a high-stakes English language test. 

Duolingo is an American Educational company focusing on making language education accessible to millions of people. The freemium software offers language courses in over 40 languages on iOS, Android, and PC devices. The Duolingo Dissertation Award was made to support innovation in language testing and research. 

SOLL graduates are no strangers to winning this award. When the program first launched in 2020, Leila Zohali won for her work with Automated Writing Evaluation. In 2021, Xingcheng Wang won for his work in English L2 interactional competence. 

Having students winning the internally acclaimed dissertation awards three years in a row is acknowledgement of  SOLL’s continuous efforts in graduate research. This together with the early recognition of four SOLL staff as world’s top 2% scientists attests to SOLL’s remarkable achievement in both conducting world-leading high-impact research and cultivating future talents for the field of linguistics and applied linguistics. 

This year represents a remarkable achievement for SOLL. Congratulations to all recipients, past and present, of the Duolingo English Test Doctoral Dissertation Award.