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.

<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.