Peeraya Utsajit

Profile

Background

I love English and teaching. Since I was young, I have been teaching my neighbours and tutoring students at different age in a tutoring school until I completed my bachelor’s degree.

In my bachelor’s degree, I majored in English. I took many courses in the areas of literature, language skills, linguistics, ESP and EAP. Then I further my study in master’s degree, also in Thailand. I did TEFL since this suited my career goal and my passion the most.

Since my graduation, I have been working as a teaching assistant at a university in Thailand. My responsibility is teaching first-year and second-year students (both non- and English-majored students), being a course coordinator, writing tests, grading and designing e-learning courses.

What motivated me to undertake PhD study?

The reasons why I decided to further my study in a doctoral level are to become a full-time lecturer at a university level, to achieve the better progress in my career, to learn how to do a research, to learn from academic people, to get firsthand experience of living and studying abroad, and to improve my English.

What makes me passionate about my subject?

I am interested in the area of vocabulary since I strongly believe that the lack of words in the second language can directly affect the performance in that language. From my teaching experience, lots of my students have difficulties in expressing their ideas, and according to them, these result from vocabulary deficiency. I believe that vocabulary carries the main meaning of any phrases, expressions, or sentences. Without correct grammar or sentence structure, people can manage to understand each other through using vocabulary.

What are my plans once I have completed my PhD?

My plan after I finish my PhD is to be a full-time lecturer at the university giving me the scholarship. I hope to be one part that can help improve the teaching and learning English for the students, the faculty, and my university.

Research interests

Submission Date: August 2020

The aim of this research is to measure the knowledge of receptive vocabulary (words one can comprehend) and productive vocabulary (words one can produce) of English-majored students at a university in Thailand. The whole sampling method will be used, and there will be around 200 participants in this study. The participants need to sit two tests, a receptive vocabulary test and one writing task to measure their productive vocabulary size/level.