The Katharine O. Aston Award for Outstanding Masters Thesis | Department of Linguistics

About Katharine O. Aston

After receiving her Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr in 1958, Katherine O. Aston was hired to teach in the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in the program of English as a Second Language. She became director of the program in 1959.

Image courtesy of the University of Illinois Archives

She accomplished much during her long academic career. She was one of the founding members of the international professional organization, Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages in the mid-1960s. She instituted the MA in TESL (Teaching English as a Second Language) at UIUC in 1966, and created one of the first Minors in TESL in the country, which met the academic and practical requirements for teaching ESL in the public schools of Illinois. She also established off-campus internships in Puerto Rico (1968-75) and Iran (1970-78), and was the director of the latter program in the mid-1970s.

The Katharine O. Aston Award for Outstanding Masters Thesis was established in her honor.

About this Award

This is an award given to a graduating MATESL student who has completed a thesis project that shows excellence in research design, data analysis, and clarity of writing. The award is decided by the majority of MATESL faculty.

Award Recipients

Year	Recipient	Thesis
2024	Rosana Gomez-Cayapu	Analyzing the influence of utterance fluency across assessed speaking profiles in the oral English placement test at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
2023	William Leroux	Language teaching anxiety among university level language teachers
2022	Adetutu (Tutu) Fabusoro	Home bilingual and cultural literacy practices of Yoruba heritage speakers towards identity maintenance in the Midwest United States
2021	Sarah Morrow	Loanword and onset consonant cluster perception by L1 Korean/L2 English speakers
2021	Mengjia Zeng	The influence of lexical features on human rater's judgement of essay performance on local English Placement Test
2020	Arzu Avci	CAF across proficiency levels and profiles: An investigation of ESL student writings in an English placement test
2018	Colin Anderson	Ecuadorian Englishes: what's behind model preferences?
2018	Erika Latham	Optimization through standardization: Investigating the efficacy of online peer review training for university ESL students
2017	Mien-Jen Wu	L1 influence on English word meaning inference
2016	Xiaowan Zhang	The relationship between test takers' performance on the TEM4 and their knowledge of the released test specifications
2015	Julie Kierski	A needs-analysis for international art students: Talk in critiques
2015	Kathleen (Kat) Kolumban	Parent and teacher perspectives on Congolese students in the American education system
2014	Robert (Stephen) Hill	Scientific laws and causality in the philosophy of second language acquisition: A neo-Aristotelian approach
2013	Kyung Eun Min	How grammar matters in NNS academic writing: the relationship between verb tense and aspect usage patterns and L2 writing proficiency in academic discourse
2011	Shawn Fitzpatrick	Using task-based elicitation to measure effectiveness of counterfactual conditional instruction
2010	Lisa Gabris	English opens doors: A portal to forgotten EFL teachers
2009	Soo Hyon Kim	Noticeability of feedback: The effects of noticing in reformulation of second language writing
2008	Julieta Fernandez	The organization of one-on-one instant messaging between native speakers of English
2006	Chiao-Ling (Lily) Chen	Cross-cultural collaboration via message board for cultural understanding and language learning
2005	Altamir Roberto M. Amorim	An investigation of teachers' reactions to an in-service teacher education program based on reflection and action research
2003	Euhnee Eunice Jang	In search of folk fairness in language
2002	Benjamin Willey	Examining a "Communication Strategy" from a conversation analytic perspective : eliciting help from native speakers inside and outside of word search sequence