Faculty Publications and Conference Presentations

This paper introduces a linked data approach to grammar. In particular, we explicate the linked data design of A Student Grammar of Chinese (Zhu & Huang, 2022) to make Chinese grammar accessible to students of different backgrounds and levels. The main linked data design of this student grammar includes: boxouts for mouseover hyperlink effects in print, narrative building through examples, and word-to-grammar links to allow easy grasp of grammar.

This article aims to examine and make recommendations to the initial assessment procedures in Adult Education context in the United Kingdom. Teachers and learners are constantly making opinions about their development, and formative assessment is one of the tools used to recognise it. In Adult Education, in addition to formative assessment, learners are expected to undergo initial assessment, testing their level of knowledge/abilities in Language, Literacy or Numeracy. Within the Adult Education context, there are several initial assessment methods available. However, it is the providers who decide which methods are most appropriate for their learners, as different methods may be appropriate in different areas. This research project focuses on an Adult Education provider based in the Midlands, United Kingdom, and offers findings that test and sometimes refute the current theory about initial assessment. Two research methods were employed to achieve the aim and objectives. Firstly, secondary data was researched. Secondly, the qualitative primary data was collected using in-depth focus groups. The research included both practitioners and learners who either conducted or experienced needs analysis processes in the adult learning context. The findings and recommendations of this article propose the use of a more ethical and reliable way of conducting initial assessment in the Adult and Community Learning context.

Embodiment has been the tenet of several linguistic theories accounting for how language conceptualizes cognitive and bodily experiences. Studies on linguistic synesthesia and sensory lexicon strengthened the embodiment account by showing that the mapping patterns amongst sense modalities likewise exhibited a tendency from the more embodied to the less embodied. This paper reports a corpus-based study of gustatory vocabulary in Mandarin Chinese to explore the interaction between embodied senses and conceptual embodiment. We first observed that the perception of là 辣 'spicy 'and má 麻 'numbing ' was chemesthesis derived from a chemical reaction from the body. In addition, the concept of taste was found capable of being depicted by variegated non-taste lexical items from less embodied sensory domains. This study posits that gustatory properties as abstract cognitive categories are likely to be derived from more embodied senses, yet when the quality of gustatory sensation is the focus, less embodied senses can be adopted to modify it. Corroborated with other recent studies, this study underlines and clarifies the role of embodiment as a versatile tool of linguistic conceptualization among multiple conceptual layers instead of being a fixed set of conceptual objects to select from.

Metaphors are often used for presenting government policy to the general public in news, but the degree to which metaphors affect evaluation of such policies is not well understood. We conducted three between-subjects experiments (Nexperiment-1 = 331; Nexperiment-2 = 301; Nexperiment-3 = 608), in which participants read news items about foreign policies. News items contained either (a) novel metaphors, (b) conventional metaphors, or (c) literal controls. Results demonstrated that novel metaphors increased cognitive text perceptions, which led participants to evaluate proposed policies more favorably in a longer passage (Experiment 1) but not in a shorter passage with a larger percentage of metaphors (Experiments 2 and 3). By contrast, Experiments 2 and 3 showed a sequential indirect effect of novel metaphors (vs. controls) through perceived novelty and affective text perceptions on policy support. These results demonstrate that novel metaphors are helpful to readers processing texts about new topics as they draw attention to the language with their novelty, but remain familiar enough to generate positive affect.

Sensorimotor information is vital to the conceptual representation of our knowledge system. This study collects perceptual and action ratings for 664 disyllabic nouns among 438 native speakers and creates the first and largest dataset of sensorimotor norms for nouns in Chinese. Using aggregated semantic covariates, including concreteness ratings from a concreteness rating study, as well as the reaction times and error rates from a lexical decision study, our current work demonstrates the strengths of sensory modalities and action effectors in Chinese nouns and explores the contributions of embodied experiences in reflecting orthographic representations and semantic processing in the Chinese language. This study contributes valuable data sources to the study of Chinese lexical processing and highlights the importance of sensorimotor information and embodied manifestations in the semantic representations of concepts. Our results also support the language universal that orthographic awareness in lexical processing and reading supersedes phonological awareness.

Syntactic complexity is a crucial aspect of linguistic proficiency and thus understanding and supporting such development in learners is a keen concern for language teachers. Research conducted has shown growing sophistication of noun phrase structures by writers of different abilities in academic writing (Biber & Gray, 2010; Liu & Li, 2016; Parkinson & Musgrave, 2014). In comparison, relatively less is known about the development of syntactic sophistication among student technical writers. Adopting a discipline-specific approach, this study compared the complexity of noun phrase structures in student texts of three performance levels from high, mid and low. The data taken from 45 technical reports of university engineering students were analyzed quantitatively using automatic syntactic analyzers and qualitatively by manual coding and text examination. The results show that noun phrase complexity is a differentiating factor for different performance levels with the stronger texts exemplifying more varied modifying structures and in greater numbers. Complex and lengthy structures, such as multiple use of prepositional phrases and combined use of other modifiers such as -ed or -ing clauses, are common in postmodification, whereas premodifying structures are simpler in structure and shorter. The study also explored the contribution of complex noun phrases to expression of meaning, showing that complex syntactic structures are commonly used to perform a diverse range of language functions essential to technical communication, such as explaining a scientific mechanism. The close connection between syntactic complexity and expression of meaning suggests that structures for pre- and postmodification should be learned as a meaning-making resource.