Oswald Stuart Harvard's Statement of Purpose

UFMG - Inglês Sem Fronteiras 

Professor: Italo Esteves 

Aluno: Oswald Stuart Nascimento Rabelo 

Data: 21/05/18 

I am applying to Harvard’s doctoral program in Education in pursuit of a career in academic research. I entered Education research because I enjoy teaching by using new methods and approaches, mainly ones with Internet-based-technologies. This interest was confirmed by my teaching internship, which included projects on organising cultural fairs, class material creation, and substitution of teachers. These experiences also led me to discover that I enjoy classroom environment, especially class of students that are beginners, younger and highly motivated, allowing me to employ last education tools available on the market, such as apps, translations and streaming websites. My interest in Linguistics and Bilingualism recently led me to explore the subfield of learning process in bilingual countries, in which I have a few research ideas. I entered educational research because I enjoy the process of teaching methodology theory area. I am fascinated of the teaching chain process, since lesson planning until thinking about the key empirical factors of a successful class, and making the correct approach to generate a motivated, engaged and participative students. For example, one project I worked on for Professor Cristina Bustamonte involved finding cognatas that are used both in Portuguese and French, thus given to beginner students the feeling of french language awareness. In this project, I enjoyed researching various words and expression used in both languages and elaborating an illustrated, joyful and familiar material adapted to brazilian students reality. Moreover, the project aimed to use inductive grammar technique as part of the learner-centered-method. Hence, I assume the principles that pure grammatic and metalinguistic use should be avoid in classroom and the main focus of a language course is to enhanced students confidence and ability to communicate based in real world and meanful situation. Overall, the greatest barriers are to boost students confidence and to elaborate comprehensive tasks to the target student audience. During my practice, I also began to discover students communicative interests, especially those related to shopping, fashion and travels. For the French cultural fair project, my major personal contribution was training my students to correctly pronounce the ingredients and commands of a “French recipes” using speech analysis software and Phonetics theory. I discovered that I enjoy carefully thinking about the highly physiological aspect of the problem, like the existence different mouth, tongue and tooth articulations for an accurate pronunciation, thus leading myself of the development of interesting accent reductions techniques. Similarly, I enjoyed the process of finding vocals insights in my survey project. One insight involved describing brazilian french students speaking pattern; another insight involved interlinguism between Brazilian Portuguese and French language. In both findings, I was especially satisfied to know that these studies contribute to the language field discoveries. My revealed interest in Languages Teaching led me towards theoretical fields with wide applications, such as Psychology and Physiology where human behaviour theory, specially neuroscience, increase the power and scope of all of teaching theories. For example, neuroscience, it is known that emotion and reasoning are intimately related in the learning process. In Physiology, the mechanism in which humans articulate their communicative apparatus are insightful whereas it is come to explain how to pronounce words. Also Evolutionary Psychology are powerful theory to explain and give hints to educators about class management and coping critical classroom situations. However, work in Humanities often lacks of empirical research, once many hypothesis testing lack of data and suffer from ethical issues constraint. To build a technical toolbox, I have studied almost five years of linguistics and statistics undergraduate courses. Overall, I am fascinated with teaching and enjoy research, especially building models and analyzing empirical data. I am interested in Language Methodology Theory, Teaching and Evolutionary Psychology and would like to explore these and other educational fields in graduate school. My fascination with research will provide me with the necessary ambition to succeed in Harvard’s program, while my extensive coursework and field preparation will provide me with the necessary skills to succeed in Harvard’s program.