Congratulations to Mi-Jin Chung, a third-year doctoral student in Linguistics and English Language, who has recently been awarded funding to support her studies by two international testing organisations.

In November, Mi-Jin's application to the Dissertation Research Awards in Language Assessment 2025, offered by the Duolingo English Test, was successful. The annual award supports dissertation research by doctoral candidates specializing in language assessment.

In January, Mi-Jin was selected as one of the award recipients of the 2026 TOEFL Grant for Doctoral Research in Language Assessment. This grant program supports the timely completion of doctoral research in foreign or second language assessment.

The title of Mi-Jin's innovative research project is "Assessing novice engineers’ pragmatic and interactional competence through AI interlocutors in a metaverse-based oral communication test." Some of the funding will go towards compensating participants in data collection for the study, including interviewees from the engineering profession and engineering students who will trial the online test Mi-Jin is designing.

Mi-Jin is supervised by Dr Dimitrinka Atanasova and Dr John Pill.