Faculty Publications and Conference Presentations

This study aims to investigate the representation of gender and the presence of male dominance in spoken discourse in two selected English Language textbooks for junior high school year one students: Longman English EDGE (2nd Edition) 1A and 1B in Hong Kong, and New Horizon: English Course Book 1 in Japan, respectively. This research employs both qualitative and quantitative analyses to examine the content of dialogues in each unit. Key areas of analysis include the number of domestic and occupational roles assigned to male, female, and gender-neutral characters, the range of activities undertaken by these characters, the character initiating conversations, the occurrence of males, females and gender-neutral characters in dialogues, and the number of spoken words and turns by them. The findings indicated an improvement in gender equality in both textbooks in various aspects, compared with other earlier textbooks which were examined by other researchers (Lee & Collins, 2008, 2010; Lee, 2018). In terms of role allocation and activities, a relatively balanced representation of male and female characters was observed. Female characters demonstrated a higher frequency of initiating conversations and taking turns. The average number of words spoken per turn by male and female characters was similar in the LE1A and LE1B textbooks, but male characters still spoke more per turn in NH1 textbook despite female characters taking more turns. Moreover, LE1A and LE1B employed gender-neutral names to mitigate gender stereotypes but gender-neutral names were not utilized in the Japanese textbook, despite the author’s effort to achieve gender equality. Considering these findings, this study reveals that male characters were underrepresented in the textbooks in Hong Kong and suggests that it is crucial to enhance gender awareness among English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers, provide explicit gender-sensitive instruction, and establish specific guidelines by educational authorities to assist textbook authors in creating gender-inclusive educational materials.

<p>Despite the growing interest in researching digital multimodal composing (DMC) in recent years, there were few attempts of tapping how assessments on DMC can best be devised to maximize students’ learning opportunities. To narrow this gap, this study proposed a set of product- and process-oriented classroom assessment rubrics that function as self-and peer-assessment tools for students when collaborating with each other to create DMC in online EAP contexts. During a four-week intervention with a veteran EAP educator, the rubric was tried out in her EAP classes as students worked in pairs to complete a DMC task. Its effectiveness was then evaluated based on the quality of student writings as well as their discussion, which was measured in terms of equality and mutuality. The product-oriented assessment rubrics was found to result in marked improvement in layout, navigation and rhetoric, whilst the process-oriented classroom assessment rubrics also enhanced both the equality and the mutuality of the collaborative process, as the dyads were inclined to establish a collaborative relationship during the task. These findings underscore the importance of using assessment rubrics as a formative assessment activity to help students harness the genre of DMC from different perspectives.</p>

<p>Nouns in human languages mostly profile concrete and abstract entities. But how much eventive information can be found in nouns? Will such eventive information found in sensory nouns have anything to do with the cognitive representation of the basic human senses? Importantly, is there any ontological and/or cognitive motivation that can account for this noun–verb dichotomy via body-and-world interactions? This study presents the first comprehensive investigation of sensory nouns in Mandarin Chinese, examining their qualia structures formalised in the Generative Lexicon Theory, as well as the time-dependent (endurant–perdurant) properties encoded in their sensory modalities. This study fills the gap in sensorial studies by highlighting the pivotal position of nouns in sensory experiences and provides insights into the interactions between perception, cognition, and language. Further, it establishes, for the first time, the cognitive motivation of the categorial noun–verb bifurcation without presupposing any a priori knowledge of grammatical categories.</p>

<p>Although much has been written about the relationship between teachers’ beliefs and practices, research examining the role of emotions in the realm of teacher cognition remains limited. This article presents a case study investigating one English as a second language (ESL) teacher’s beliefs and practices about teaching literary texts, drawing on Zembylas’ three levels of teacher emotions (2002, 2005), i.e. intrapersonal, interpersonal and intergroup, as the conceptual framework. The ESL teacher’s beliefs and practices were investigated via open-ended interviews and lesson observations that explored her perceptions of teaching literary texts throughout one academic year. The findings point to the complexity of teacher practices which may converge or diverge with their beliefs. Various contextual factors were found to contribute to this complexity. The results highlight the need to situate the emotions of teachers beyond contextual factors and consider the dynamic nature of teacher cognition. The practical value of the study lies in its extension of the role of emotions in mediating teacher cognition.</p>

<p>Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have consistently showed poor performances in reading comprehension. Extending from previous studies that presented pure-text, this study aims to test the performances of graphic novel reading. We tested 24 Chinese children who have been diagnosed as DLD and 24 typical readers matched with age and nonverbal IQ. These children were asked to complete a battery of tests assessing graphic novel reading comprehension and related visual-cognitive skills. The results of group comparison indicated that children with DLD performed similarly to the typical readers in graphic novel comprehension. Moreover, significant links between comic convention understanding and both passage and graphic novel reading were found in both groups. Our results imply the benefits of using graphic novel to facilitate reading to learn in children with DLD. (129 words).</p>

<p>This article reports a case study of an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher in Hong Kong who conducted lessons via Zoom during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study focused on the factors influencing her technology integration in synchronous online teaching mode. Using data from classroom recordings, stimulated-recall and semi-structured interviews, this study uncovered how Zoom functioned as a substitute for face-to-face lessons. The findings revealed that although there were fewer interactions between the teacher and her students, teaching in synchronous online mode provided the teacher with opportunities to utilize certain online features to augment methods of checking student understanding. The study identified the teacher’s pedagogical beliefs, the context and professional development as factors that influenced the level of technology integration in her Zoom classes. The study concludes that embracing process-oriented pedagogies may be necessary for a higher level of technology integration among ESL teachers who have adequate professional development opportunities and school support.</p>

The practice of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) has been known to be troublesome to teachers. (Webb &amp; Tierney, 2020). The authors argue that a mentoring approach based on threshold concepts in SoTL has the potential to lead to more confident conceptual border crossing by new entrants to the SoTL of English communication. A collaborative reflection by a departmental SoTL mentoring partnership was undertaken to identify changes in the mentees&apos; knowledge of scholarship, context-specificity, and the development of expertise. The insights gained point to the efficacy of a knowledge- driven approach to academic mentoring for SoTL scholar development.

<p>Linguistic synesthesia links two concepts from two distinct sensory domains and creates conceptual conflicts at the level of embodied cognition. Previous studies focused on constraints on the directionality of synesthetic mapping as a way to establish the conceptual hierarchy among the five senses (i.e., vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch). This study goes beyond examining the directionality of conventionalized synesthetic terms by adopting a Conceptual Metaphor Theory approach (i.e., the Conceptual Mapping Model) to test if conventional synesthetic directionality still holds when it comes to novel metaphorical expressions. The subjects, 308 native English speakers, are asked to judge the degree of commonness, appropriateness, understandability, and figurativeness in order to measure the degree of comprehensibility of novel synesthetic metaphors. Our findings demonstrate that novel synesthetic metaphors that follow conventional directionality are considered more common, more appropriate, and easier to comprehend than those that violate conventional mapping principles; they are also judged as more literal than those that do not follow conventional directionality. This study explores linguistic synesthesia from the perspective of comprehension of novel synesthetic metaphors, posits a pivotal position for mapping principles in synesthetic directionality, and supports an embodied account of linguistic synesthesia.</p>

<p>Previous language attitude research in Hong Kong compared Hong Kong English (HKE) to exonormative standard Englishes, whereas this study uses five varieties of HKE with more or less localised features. One hundred English language teachers were listener judges in a verbal-guise experiment, and the results showed that most of the speakers received positive evaluations, particularly on solidarity dimensions. The speaker with most local features received the most negative evaluation, but the difference was most evident on status dimensions. Thus, speakers of HKE are seen as likeable, competent and proficient, which suggests that Hong Kong may have entered into the nativisation stage of Kachru’s (1983) model. We argue that the recognition of HKE demonstrated in this study should have implications for English language teaching. We propose adopting pedagogies grounded in local language and culture, which would encourage students and teachers to express themselves in localised English, and express a local identity.</p>