Dr Lynette May

Biography

Lyn is a Senior Lecturer in applied linguistics and teacher education in the School of Teacher Education and Leardership in the Faculty of Education. After completing her PhD in language assessment through the University of Melbourne, Lyn is primarily involved in developing and teaching postgraduate and undergraduate courses on language assessment and second language teaching and learning. Lyn has worked in tertiary institutions in China, Singapore and Australia, and has taught English for Academic Purposes (EAP) in university language centres and English literature in secondary school. She joined QUT as an academic in 2008, following nine years as a lecturer with the National Institute of Education (NIE) in Singapore. Lyn was the recipient of the Robert Lado Award for Best Graduate Student Presentation from the International Language Testing Association (ILTA) in 2006 for a paper presented at the Language Testing Research Colloquium in Melbourne, and was invited as a keynote speaker to the University of Sydney TESOL Research Network Colloquium in 2009. She was the Co-President of the Association for Language Testing and Assessment of  Australia and New Zealand (ALTAANZ) in 2011, and is currently the co-editor of the Australian Council of TESOL Association journal TESOL in Context. Lyn is currently involved in three funded research projects: a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) grant for 'Test Preparation: Does it enhance test performance and English Language Proficiency?', an IELTS research grant for 'Transitioning from university to the workplace: Stakeholder perceptions of academic and professional writing demands'; and a British Council research grant for 'Features of discourse and lexical richness at different performance levels in the APTIS speaking test'.

Selected conference presentations

• November, 2012.  Association for Language Testing and Assessment of Australia and New Zealand (ALTAANZ).  University of Sydney.  IELTS test preparation: A case study of instructional practices.  
• November, 2011.  Applied Linguistics Association of Australia Annual Congress.  Australian National University, Canberra.  Task fulfilment in a paired speaking test: the rater's perspective.
• October, 2010.  TESOL Research Network Colloquium.  University of Sydney.  Exploring rater perceptions of interactional competence in a paired speaking test through rater notes, stimulated verbal recall and rater discussion
• July, 2010.  Applied Linguistics Association of Australia Annual Congress.  Co-wrote and presented with Dr Margaret Kettle: Examining oracy demands in a frst-year university course: implications for international students
• April, 2010.  Language Testing Research Colloquium.  Cambridge University.  Co-organiser of the symposium “Exploring interactional competence in paired and group speaking tests".  Presented the paper Interactional competence from the rater’s perspective: how separable are the co-constructed performances in a paired speaking test?
• September, 2009.   TESOL Research Network Colloquium. University of Sydney.  Keynote presentation:  Developing listening and speaking tasks to reflect the ‘social turn’ in language testing
• March, 2009.  American Association for Applied Linguistics Congress.  Denver.  Interactional competence in a paired speaking test: the rater’s perspective

Research
In a team with Dr Cathie Doherty and Dr Marg Kettle, Lyn was the recipient of a 2008 QUT Early Career Researcher Grant for their project: Spoken genres in two first year courses: Investigating classroom interaction and assessment demands. Lyn was awarded a QUT ECARD grant for 2009-2010, which has enabled her to use Conversation Analysis (CA) in order to further explore the discourse elicited through paired speaking tests.