Faculty Publications and Conference Presentations

Recently (March 31, 2026) I delivered a presentation on "Teacher Well-being" at a CUHK with an audience of educators, and have recorded a version to share with CLE colleagues here.

This talk brings together both research and practice, with a focus on what teacher well-being means in our current Hong Kong context and why it matters for student learning. It begins by outlining the local landscape, where increasing workload, emotional demands, and structural pressures are contributing to sustained strain on teachers (Hong Kong Federation of Education Workers, 2024; Ip, 2025; Lau & Chan, 2025). This framing highlights that teacher well-being is not only an individual issue, but a broader systemic concern.

The second part draws on a systematic review of 14 studies examining teacher burnout and student outcomes. Across studies, higher levels of teacher burnout were generally associated with lower student academic achievement, with effects observed across cross-sectional, longitudinal, and a small number of experimental designs (Madigan & Kim, 2021). In contrast, findings for student motivation, well-being, and classroom relationships were more mixed and primarily based on cross-sectional evidence, suggesting that these outcomes are less conclusive and require further investigation. Overall, the review indicates that teacher burnout is most consistently linked to how students perform, reinforcing the importance of teacher well-being as part of effective teaching and learning.

The third section draws on large-scale international data from PISA 2018, including over 90,000 students across 19 countries/regions, linked with teacher data at the school level. The findings show that teacher well-being is positively associated with students’ life satisfaction and positive affect, and negatively associated with negative affect, even after controlling for background factors such as socioeconomic status and gender (Nalipay et al., 2024). This provides evidence that teacher well-being may extend beyond the individual, shaping students’ emotional experiences through classroom climate and daily interactions.

The final part of the session shifts toward application, offering a set of practical, research-informed strategies that can be integrated into everyday teaching. These focus on building small, sustainable habits, engaging in intentional forms of rest that support recovery, and establishing boundaries that protect time and energy over time (Lemon, 2022).

I’m sharing this recording as a resource for colleagues who are interested in both understanding the evidence and reflecting on how it might translate into their own teaching practice.

Thank you for reading and watching!

References:

Ip, Y. (2025). Hong Kong must care for its teachers before it’s too late. South China Morning Post.

Ip, Y. (2025). Stress facing Hong Kong teachers and students is a collective problem we cannot ignore. South China Morning Post.

6,500 teachers quit Hong Kong schools in last academic year, bringing total to nearly 12,000 since 2021. (2024). South China Morning Post.

Hong Kong’s overworked preschool teachers clock median of 55 hours per week: Survey. (2025). South China Morning Post.

Lemon, N. (2024). Habits, boundaries and you. In The 'how' of self-care for teachers: Building your teacher wellbeing toolkit. Routledge.

Madigan, D. J., & Kim, L. E. (2024). Does teacher burnout affect students? A systematic review of its association with academic achievement and student-reported outcomes. International Journal of Educational Research.

Nalipay, M. J. N., King, R. B., & Cai, Y. (2024). Happy teachers make happy students: The social contagion of well-being from teachers to their students. School Mental Health, 16, 1223–1235. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12310-024-09688-0

Instead of using a single GenAI tool to create a one-note research paper, why not tune up an orchestra of machine assistants?<br/>

<p>A phrasal verb (PV) is a type of formulaic language that is ubiquitous in informal English discourse but notoriously challenging for English language learners. With many learners struggling to develop knowledge of formulaic language, this study investigated whether they make measurable PV gains over time and which factors in a study-abroad environment facilitated the development of PVs. Seventy-five mixed-L1 foundation students in the UK were tracked over the first two terms in an academic year. They completed a productive PV test, a receptive PV test, an Updated Vocabulary Levels Test, a language contact questionnaire, and a social network survey when studying abroad. Using descriptive statistics, paired-samples t-tests, and mixed-effects modelling, the findings indicate that the participants made only small gains in PV knowledge in two terms of study abroad. Interestingly, they made larger gains in productive knowledge than receptive knowledge, suggesting that they consolidated existing knowledge more than acquiring new PVs. Overall vocabulary knowledge, PV corpus frequency, and language contact significantly predicted PV knowledge, while semantic transparency and L2 social networks did not. Overall vocabulary knowledge and L2 social networks predicted PV gains. This study reveals that the developmenet of PV knowledge is relatively slow and incremental during study abroad. Thus, high-quality L2 interaction may be necessary for international students to develop PV knowledge in such contexts.</p>

This essay examines the potential impact of paid-for or premium language models, where some students may be able to afford advanced models generating superior outputs while others could face inequities due to financial constraints. It explores how this dynamic can exacerbate the digital divide, challenge traditional as well as more recent assessment methods in language education, and discusses strategies that hold promise in navigating these complexities in the era of Generative AI within the context of higher education.

This essay examines the potential impact of paid-for or premium language models, where some students may be able to afford advanced models generating superior outputs while others could face inequities due to financial constraints. It explores how this dynamic can exacerbate the digital divide, challenge traditional as well as more recent assessment methods in language education, and discusses strategies that hold promise in navigating these complexities in the era of Generative AI within the context of higher education.

<p>The current research is an extension and partial replication of Köylü (2018. Comprehension of conversational implicatures in L2 English. Intercultural Pragmatics 15(3). 373-408.) and it investigates the development of conversational implicatures in third language (L3) Mandarin. More specifically, this study explores whether learners with a first language (L1) Cantonese and second language (L2) English background are able to comprehend implied meaning in L3 Mandarin. 14 L1 Cantonese L2 English L3 Mandarin participants with a high intermediate level of Mandarin proficiency took part in the study. There was also a control group of 11 native speakers of Mandarin. Quantitative results based on a 20-item audiovisual interpretation task demonstrate that the L3 learners of Mandarin were not on a par with native speakers of Mandarin in arriving at an intended implicature for the test items. A qualitative analysis of learner responses indicates that the learners' interpretation of conversational implicatures in L3 Mandarin, although usually successful, was also characterized by repetitions, literal comprehension, and recognition of a gap between the literal and the implied meaning, as well as unintended implicatures.</p>

<p>Generative artificial intelligence has emerged as a powerful technological innovation that is exerting a sweeping influence in the education sector. The rapid diffusion of ChatGPT in universities worldwide presents both opportunities and challenges to higher education policy and administration. This study seeks to examine students’ behavioural and perceptual experiences with the use of ChatGPT at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, which was among the first universities worldwide to introduce officially protected ChatGPT services. Launched in November 2023, a university-wide student survey sampled 680 students from both the Hong Kong campus and the Guangzhou campus in Mainland China. The results indicate significant usage of ChatGPT services among the students and a very high level of intention to continue that use. The students perceive ChatGPT to contribute positively to both their learning and career development. Significant variations were found according to gender, level of study, age group, discipline, and country/region of origin, in terms of the students’ experiences with ChatGPT. These results offer useful evidence for curriculum reform and the improvement of students’ AI literacy in higher education institutions.</p>

Teaching large language classes presents unique challenges in maintaining engagement and personalized instruction. This study explores innovative approaches through a qualitative case study of LANG1234: Professional Speaking for the Workplace, an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) course at a Hong Kong university designed to develop professional communication skills across disciplines in a large class size format. Grounded in the ESP principle of addressing learners’ specific professional needs, the course features modules on branding, crisis communication, and intercultural competence. Drawing on instructor reflections and course documents, the paper examines how co-teaching models, technology integration, and active learning strategies are deployed to overcome the constraints of the large-class format. Findings indicate that collaborative co-teaching, digital tools (e.g., Miro, Mentimeter), and structured interactions successfully foster an interactive, skills-based learning environment. The study also identifies key challenges, including instructor role ambiguity and the ‘disjuncture’ of teaching profession-specific content, underscoring the need for structured professional development to support ESP educators in effectively scaling interactive, communicative language instruction.<br/><br/>

<p>This article aims to bridge the research gap in understanding the dynamic and discursive nature of translanguaging spaces. It does so through exploring the temporal and interactional qualities of translanguaging spaces using a newly proposed space-centred systematic observation approach to analyze two cases from Kongish Daily, a Hong Kong Facebook page with 75,000 subscribers. By examining initial social media posts, responses, and related discourses at the core of the interaction and in surrounding events, we describe how spaces expand over time through incorporation of new sociocultural references. Results demonstrate how new networks of meaning are created through the expansion and interconnectedness of multiple spaces. Case 1 shows the expansion of the translanguaging space during engagement with a Kongish poem. Case 2 reveals how the expression "loong"and its network of significations developed across sociopolitical and temporal contexts. By observing translanguaging spaces longitudinally across timescales, this novel approach effectively captures their context-dependent dynamic qualities beyond static language and space constructs. It also shows the creative and critical potential of translanguaging to circumvent more powerful state discourses while camouflaging resistance. The study thus offers theoretical and methodological contributions regarding translanguaging spaces' interactional properties. It has implications for more adequately researching complex linguistic repertoires and translanguaging in diverse communities today.</p>

<p>Teacher emotions are vitally important for the classroom environment and students’ language attainment; however, studies concerning foreign language teaching anxiety remain scarce. This study examined foreign language teaching anxiety through administering questionnaires to 235 in-service teachers to investigate the impacts of educational stages and teaching experience on foreign language teaching anxiety. The statistical results show that secondary school teachers exhibit significantly higher levels of foreign language teaching anxiety than their primary counterparts, especially in ‘lack of student interest’ and ‘fear of negative evaluation’. Novice teachers are significantly more anxious than experienced teachers in the dimension of ‘teaching inexperience’, whereas no other differences are shown in other aspects. No interaction effects are observed between the two variables. Pedagogical implications for understanding foreign language teaching anxiety in different educational and experiential stages and corresponding anxiety-reducing strategies are discussed.</p>