Faculty Publications and Conference Presentations

Undergraduate engineering programmes worldwide aim to equip their graduates with specialised skills applicable to a career in the discipline. These programmes increasingly include instruction in professional communication skills by language educators. Engineering faculty often request that students be instructed in discipline-specific professional skills, while universities may expect graduates to have developed a broad range of transferable skills, often expressed as ‘graduate attributes’. Language educators developing professional communication courses for engineering students need to consider how specific their instruction should be, given that the communication needs of engineers will change as they transition from frontline technical roles to managerial positions when ascending the career ladder. This chapter presents four best practices for the design of professional communication courses for engineering students, based on the experience of course developers in the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. These principles attempt to meet the expectations of subject faculty that their students will learn discipline-specific professional skills, whilst addressing the longer-term communication needs of engineers. These four best practices are likely to be relevant to other language educators facing a similar mix of expectations and requests from subject faculty and academic leaders in their own institutions.

This book chapter provides an overview of Temi, an autonomous, video-oriented personal assistant robot which was deployed within the Centre for Independent Language Learning (CILL) at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The artificial intelligence robot was chosen principally because of its role as a Robot as a Service (RaaS). Such a service can deliver greater self-improvement and better learning strategies (e.g. Cohen, A. D. (2014). Strategies in learning and using a second language (2nd ed.). Routledge., Dörnyei et. al., 2015, Wenden, Learner strategies for learner autonomy, Prentice Hall, 1991, Yang, Frontiers in Psychology 12:600, 218–600, 218, 2021) as well as foster beneficial attitudes and skills towards the users’ long-term language learning success. Through its cloud-based system, Temi offers users access to dynamic interactions and enhanced CILL services, during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a whole, it appears that the introduction of Temi has proven to be an effective strategy to augment learners’ autonomy. It further allows administrators to rethink how CILL services are conducted during human resource shortages.

This chapter argues that there is a need for more formal, scholarly work published by language practitioners themselves. It takes the view that a ‘scholar-practitioner’ expectation is appropriate for language educators teaching at university level. Starting with the often used definition of scholarship articulated by Shulman (2000), the first half of the chapter sets out why a distinct label for the scholarly work of language practitioners is needed. The argument is that the use of the term scholarship can include research, but that the nature of the scholarly activity of practitioners is different enough to warrant a label to distinguish it from the work of those academics for whom research is a formal expectation. The second half of the chapter goes on to explore each of the chapters presented in this edited volume. In doing so, it illustrates how the work of language practitioners confirms the view of scholarship as argued for here. It demonstrates not only the importance of scholarship by language practitioners in higher education, but also draws out future directions, indicating further work that can be done to build on the best practice included in this volume.