Faculty Publications and Conference Presentations

<p>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.</p>

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.

Collaborative writing skills are crucial to primary students, yet the abrupt shift to synchronous online teaching has perplexed many English teachers in my school, as they struggled to find effective ways to teach writing in online settings. Using various platforms and video-conferencing tools, I investigated whether a novel e-process approach can boost students’ writing quality and foster their collaboration skills during two rounds of multi-modal collaborative writing. Writing quality is determined through assigning a composite score in content, grammar and organization aspects, whilst collaboration skill is measured in terms of equality and mutuality during students’ interactions. Teachers’ opinions on the above are also solicited. The analysis revealed that students were generally eager to produce writings with ample ideas and few mistakes. The better-able students were more competent in maintaining elaborated verbal exchanges, though some appeared to dominate the discussion, whilst the less-able ones apparently lacked the language to interact with peers. Teachers’ observations also confirmed the analysis of writings and video recordings. The findings provided initial evidence to suggest that the novel pedagogy is effective in boosting students’ writing quality, yet explicit guidance on the collaborative process is indispensable. This study is limited in its low generalizability to younger cohorts. 

Short Descriptions

Aim Building Business English Students’ Confidence in Using English is a small corpus-based project aiming at, as the title suggests, helping business students become even more confident and effective communicators. Rationale Using a linguistic approach, students work on various subjects, including syntax, semantics, and sounds, with authentic materials taken from their coursebooks. In this way, students will kill two birds with one stone, or rather, engage in a win-win situation because they can learn not only language skills, but also revise their subject knowledge. Even though Business students in general are more able students when it comes to communication skills, they may still benefit from working on topics such as the end-weight principle and parallelism under syntax; hyponyms and hypernyms under semantics; English stress rules such as rules governing stress falling on the penultimate syllable or ante-penultimate syllable under sounds or phonology.

Possible Benefits

Further Research The materials will be tried and tested. If the project, in particular, the materials, receives positive feedback, other subjects such as Finance, Marketing, and Information Systems could be examined using this approach.

Deliverables

Deliverables Student helpers/interns were hired to assist in developing materials for this project. With some basic training in corpus linguistics and using AntConc, a tool for analyzing text, student helpers/interns built a corpus focusing on Macroeconomics, Microeconomics, and Accounting with a size of over 740,000 words, and created learning materials addressing syntax, semantics, and sounds and the first draft of materials have been uploaded onto Lumi Syntax: https://app.lumi.education/run/u6z-39 Semantics: https://app.Lumi.education/run/xXRrDm Sounds: https://app.Lumi.education/run/iGLZ1U A document about FAQ has been created by a student helper/intern as well FAQ.docx.

T&F Pronunciation Project- Self-directed Learning Pathways

Project Title

Development and design of self-directed pronunciation learning pathways in an intelligibility-based approach

Project Members
Thomas Chan (Leader), Venus Kam and Mansurbek Kushnazarov

Introduction

We have designed the online pronunciation learning pathways to provide Hong Kong university students with self-accessed tools and guidance to enhance their English pronunciation intelligibility. Grounded in research demonstrating the importance of intelligible pronunciation for successful communication over native-like accent reproduction (Levis, 2005), the learning pathways adopt a scaffolded approach that supplements targeted instruction of problematic features for Cantonese speakers with rich and interactive listening and speaking exercises.

Beginning with individual speech sounds and segmentals, the learning pathways gradually build students' pronunciation skills through phrases, sentences, and longer stretches of discourse featuring diverse English accents. Audiovisual technology like speech recognition and instant feedback is utilized to optimize students' practice and learning experience.

The goal is to enable students to progress from an initial to an intelligible level of pronunciation competence that will allow them to communicate clearly and confidently in a variety of academic and professional contexts. It is hoped that the learning pathways could ultimately help foster students’ autonomy in learning and facilitate their success in improving their spoken English communication skills at their own pace according to their needs.

Please click the link below to learn how the project team adopted an intelligibility-based approach in developing and designing the pronunciation learning pathways:

2023 Summer DPS_Pronunciation Project Self-directed Learning Pathways.pdf

Distinguishing PD from CLE Scholarship Series - 8.11.22.docx