By Philip Nathan
Head of MA Programmes
The January graduation ceremony marked the formal process of graduation for DCAD’s MA students. Six students from last year’s MA TESOL/Applied Linguistics for TESOL group, who had all travelled from China and were accompanied by family members, made it to the ceremony at Durham’s historic Cathedral, certainly a fitting venue in which to celebrate their graduation achievement.
Greeted by opening and welcoming speeches, including one from the Vice-Chancellor, Stuart Corbridge, our MA students, in line with the procedures of such graduation ceremonies, came forward to shake hands with our university Chancellor, Sir Thomas Allen, being finally proclaimed as having become graduates of the university. The chancellor gave an inspiring speech ending through reminding students to live with kindness, a sentiment widely appreciated by students and staff at the ceremony.
Our MA students then came down to a celebration party organised by Claire Grendale and Tracy Reith with party banners, balloons and a wide selection of food. There was much joyful conversation and celebration with DCAD lecturers and teachers in attendance. Finally, at around 4pm, we said our goodbyes to the students expressing hopes that we will see them again in the near future.
Thanks go in particular to Claire and Tracy for organising the occasion and to all those lecturers and teaching staff who came along to the event.
Former MA Student Receives Doctorate
We are pleased to announce that our former MA student, Xuanhong Guo (Grace), was awarded her PhD from the School of Education in January. Our congratulations go to Grace who studied on the MA in the academic years 2015-2016 and took a particular interest in the area of discourse. Grace’s thesis focused on the use of lexical cohesion in the academic writing of Chinese students. Over the period of her study she presented at a number of conferences and is looking to publish the outcomes of her work in the very near future. Grace’s success was the result of 4 years of hard endeavour. She is now in Germany but we hope to see Grace in March this year when we are planning that she will be giving a seminar on our Discourse, texts and TESOL module.