Faculty Publications and Conference Presentations

Short Descriptions

This personal project is a continuation of my previous work on learner engagement. This previous work resulted in a Center-wide review of if and how we assess participation on our courses and a change in our attendance policy. I am very pleased to read many references to learner engagement in our colleagues' Scholarship Snippets and proud to have brought this concept to the fore in the Center. The project also emerges from reflections on my own observation event and a response to my post on Scholarship Snippets (thanks Rebecca). I am keen to continue to explore how we diagnose the four different types of engagement in our classrooms, cognitive, behavioural, affective, and especially, social, and wonder if there is a chicken or egg-type relationship between social engagement and collaborative competence. In other words, if a student is not engaged socially, will this hinder his/her development of collaborative competence? And if a student does not have the competence to work collaboratively in a team, is it possible that he/she will never engage socially? The implications of a lack of social engagement are significant. Pekrun and Linnenbrink-Garcia (2012) point out that someone who is disconnected with other group members, and thus socially disengaged, is likely also behaviorally off-task: not listening to responses of other members, not contributing to the interaction. They are also unlikely to invest effort or persistence, or to direct attentional resources in effective ways to be cognitively engaged. However, in her response to my reflections, Rebecca highlights the complexity of the interrelationship between the different types of engagement: 'some socially anxious students may well be minimally cognitively engaged when they are speaking - due to the overwhelming stress of the simple act of speaking - and some may not be learning as a result, even though they are speaking.' Since we seem to prize collaboration and now assess collaborative competence, this issue is of interest to me, and I believe warrants attention.

Possible Benefits

Insight into how we promote and assess development of collaborative competence

Deliverables

Talk at EYE in August

Short Descriptions

Syntactic development is an important indicator of writing ability. Syntactic range and sophistication typically feature in English proficiency assessment such as IELTS and TOEFL. It is expected that learner writers would increase in syntactic sophistication as their language proficiency improves, allowing them to express ideas in greater sophistication and compactness. Understanding and supporting the development of syntactic complexity in learners is therefore a keen concern for language teachers. One linguistic structure that has received much attention in recent years has been the noun phrase. In their large-scale corpus-based studies, Biber and Gray (2010) provide convincing evidence that complex nominals, rather than clausal subordination as in some popular beliefs, are a defining characteristic of academic writing. While there is increasing understanding of noun phrase complexity development in academic writing in general, relatively little is known about the topic against the realm of technical writing (Guillerit, 2020). Given that technical writing aims to convey very specific information and is also associated with distinct registers (such as technical reports), it may pose different requirements for syntactic complexity compared with general academic writing. Since 2020, several small-scale studies have been conducted by Joyce, KY and Eric on the writings of 2nd year engineering students to investigate the relationship between noun phrase complexity and performance levels. This present study is a continuation of the investigation that we started in Feb 2022 under the support of the MA Research Experience Project. We compare Year 4 student writing texts of high and low performance levels against the texts of the same students in Year 2. We would like to explore if there is any indication of progress in these two sets of texts in terms of noun phrase complexity.

Deliverables

Summer EYE – Short paper session

The aim of this project is to replicate part of the research by Joyce, Ky and Eric, “Syntactic Complexity and Writing Quality in Students’ Technical Writing”, which was conducted with students in the School of Engineering.

The syntactic complexity of student writing in LANG2070 was investigated to determine what differences exist between levels of proficiency. This is so we can better understand where and how students’ academic writing can be developed and whether differences exist in the syntactic complexity of student writing between the disciplines of Engineering and Humanities and Social Sciences. For this project, the focus is on the complexity of noun phrases. 

A corpus of 12 student texts (1100 to 1300 words each) from 4 teachers on LANG2070 was created. The corpus contains 4 texts each from high, middle and low levels.  Each level was then analyzed using an automatic syntactic complexity tool to determine three measures of syntactic complexity.

Initial results show some difference in use of noun phrase complexity between the levels.  The next stages involve manually analyzing concordances from the corpus to determine the types of complex noun phrases used across the three levels and then compare this to the original research by Joyce, Ky and Eric.

Short Descriptions

My fourth project for the summer is another research publication I have been working on. I plan to finish writing it up and submit it to a top-tier journal for publication. Here is my abstract: This article details the syntactic variation in Hong Kong English observed in college student essays. The essays were produced by 79 students in 4 different sections of an upper-intermediate English language course at a research university in Hong Kong. The students were asked to write two reflection essays evaluating the efficiency of the course and their own performance. Out of 158 300-word reflection essays, 48 essays (i.e., about 30% of the total number of essays) were randomly selected and analyzed. The analysis revealed two general patterns, each with 5 sub-categories. The first general pattern was the omission of various grammatical forms in obligatory contexts such as the omission of the indefinite article, definite article, the subject relative pronoun, the copula in a relative clause construction, and the past tense marker. The next general pattern was using certain grammatical and lexical forms with intended meanings not found in English. These included using "will" with a past tense reference, using "will" with a past tense habitual reference, using "will" with a present tense habitual reference, using counterfactual conditionals instead of factual conditionals, and finally using an "although…but" construction. Although the attested usages of English were all ungrammatical in standard English, those different constructions never led to a communication breakdown as the intended meaning in each context was successfully conveyed. That leads to an interesting question as to whether such forms are on a path to be grammaticalized in Hong Kong English. The article ends with a discussion on the dichotomy between descriptive and prescriptive linguistics, as well as pedagogical implications of the findings.

Summary of the Article

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.

Reference

Ladegaard, Hans J. and Chan, K. L. R. (2022). Teachers’ attitudes towards varieties of Hong Kong English Implications for English language teaching. English World-wide. Advanced Online Publication. https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.21060.lad

Short Descriptions

We are a group of teachers who enjoy teaching science communication genres and trust that via doing text analysis we can get to know more about these genres and their stylistic features, use of vocabulary and syntax.

Possible Benefits

There will be positive washback effects to teaching, material writing and gaining credibility from students if we know the science communication genres that we teach well.

Deliverables

-text analysis frameworks -text analysis data - useful findings for writing materials for teaching Lang3024, Lang3025 (& Lang2010, maybe)

Short Descriptions

With the continuous development of internet technology, online education has gradually become a new type of teaching mode (Anderson, 2004). In this context, the Chinese government began to implement the ‘Online Education and Research Network Demonstration Project’ in 1994 (Zhang and Han, 2005). As of March 2021, China has set up 68 colleges and universities with supplementary or elective courses for modern online education courses, and the coverage of online education has reached 31 provinces, autonomous prefectures, and municipal districts across China (Cao, 2021). The development and promotion of online education frees students and teachers from the restrictions of regions, countries and environments. Also, in online education, educators and students seem to face fewer restrictions, especially in the areas of creativity and autonomy (Vanslambrouck, et al., 2018). However, a part of students and educators have doubts about the quality and efficiency of online courses. It has been suggested that online courses impact the teacher-student relationship. In addition, there are concerns that other issues, such as evaluation, interaction, time, location, and participation, may alter the teacher-student dynamic (Kang, Wu and Fu, 2006).

Possible Benefits

This project explores the influence of online education on the relationship between teachers and students in higher education institutions in mainland China using quantitative and qualitative research methods. The quantitative research will measure factors such as the communication platforms and the expectations surrounding the teacher-student relationship. In addition, the qualitative research will consider factors such as course types and if subject choices have positive or negative impacts on the relationship between teachers and students in Chinese higher education institutions. In accordance with the results of the quantitative and qualitative research, the project will make recommendations that could help improve the relationship between teachers and students in an online learning environment.

Deliverables

Research paper presentation at the International Conference on Education in Hawaii in January 2023

The inventor of Motion Pictures Thomas Edison was widely quoted as saying in 1913: “Books will soon be obsolete in the public schools. Scholars will be instructed through the eye. It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture. Our school system will be completely changed inside of ten years”. Almost a century later motion pictures are yet to be the dominant source of classroom instruction. We still rely on the physical presence of a teacher to provide instruction.  In the last years of the pandemic, we have seen an acceleration of digital media and online instruction; clearly, Thomas Edison overestimated the complete proliferation of film/ audiovisual media in education.

It is my scholarship endeavour to explore in-depth how social and technological development has made possible the emergence of new pedagogical theories that favour the inclusion of films in third language teaching. As a means to explore this topic, I recently collaborated on a course conducted in Spain by the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona “A dive into Contemporary Spanish Culture and History through Film”. The main objective was to analyze, review and critique the impact that cinematic representations have had on the construction of an imaginary identity contrasting them with the individual experiences of foreign and Spanish Students to understand a more inclusive, extensive and complex image of Spanish Cultural diversity.  I shared and presented my views on the perception and popularism of Spanish and Hispanic culture in Hong Kong. This forms the foundation of exploratory research on my forthcoming presentation and possibly a paper on the topic.

It is the opinion of some scholars that the use of audio-visual media in education as a whole has been forced and brought about by the multimodal communication in which we find ourselves immersed. This has resulted in bringing with it new literacies or multi-literacies that add a contribution significant to the traditional focus on verbal literacy. The use of film in relation to pragmatics; as a tool and effective teaching method is widely recognized by an array of scholars: (Atherton, 2013; Chang & Cryer, 2009; Engert & Spencer, 2009; Gregg, Hosley, Weng & Montemayor, 1995; Paddock, Terranova & Giles, 2001; Tognozzi, 2010). This particular format of teaching to undergraduate students through feature films has been used in courses on introductory Social Psychology, Political Sociology, Family, Social Stratification, Collective Behaviour and Mass Communications (Smith, 1982).

In determining the benefits of the use of films in the development of linguistic and cultural knowledge and in the promotion of cognitive abilities; one must bear in mind that the use of films in the classroom has not always been easy, or welcome and has its detractors. We have to consider and identify the historical obstacles this mode of teaching has had in being used widely and effectively.

There is no doubt about the benefits of the inclusion of films as an important tool in teaching languages.  Films are a cultural asset, a means of artistic education, a fact of social communication, an industry, an object of commerce, widely used in teaching, study and research. Today there is a recognition by universities; a reflection of the pulse of the relevance of films in third language education. This is reflected in the subtle change of attitude and the inclusion of films in teaching as referenced in some important documentation such as the: Common European Framework of Reference and the curricular plan of the Cervantes Institute.

Much of the work has been focused on EFL (English as a Foreign Language). I believe the same principle applies to the application of “Pragmatics” in any language. Using films in third language teaching is not new. Kutuzuova (1982) places more emphasis on the use of films than on reading passages or stories because films offer richer material for listening and speaking. Massi and Merino (1996) emphasized that giving visual messages a place in the classroom is interesting and entertaining for the learners, provides them with an opportunity to ask more questions, and offers a refreshing change of routine.

Given all the above scholarship research; it is my aim to delve deeper into this topic with a specific focus on improving the instruction of third language courses with the objective of providing learners with a richer, more comprehensive learning experience.  Through collaboration and a sharing of best practices, I hope my endeavour assists my peers and fellow linguists.

REFERENCES:

American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. 1996. Standards for foreign language learning: Preparing for the 21st Century.

Atherton, M. (2013). Teaching through film: Utilizing popular criminology in the

classroom. Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, 24(2), 77-99.

Chang, T. F. H., & Cryer, M. T. (2009). Popcorn and Politics: Teaching politics

through film. Labor Studies Journal, 34(3), 408-414.

Engert, S., & Spencer, A. (2009). International relations at the movies: Teaching and

learning about international politics through film. Perspectives, 17(1), 83-103.

Gregg, V. R, Hosley, C. H., Weng, A., & Montemayor, R. (1995). Using films to

remote active learning in the college classroom. Proceeding of the Annual

Conference on Undergraduate Teaching of Psychology, 32-43. Ellenville, NY.

International Journal of Instruction, January 2021, Vol.14, No.1

Kutuzova, G.I. (1982). Criteria for Choosing of Informative and Cognitive

Films. Moscow.

Lay, T. (2009). The effects of videotape sources on language learning.

Multilingual, 12, 26-38.

Massi, M. & Merino, A. (1996). Films and EFL. What's Playing in the Language

Classroom? English Teaching Forum. Vol. 34 No 1.

Paddock, J. R., Terranova, S., & Giles, L. (2001). SASB goes Hollywood: Teaching

personality theories through movies. Teaching of Psychology, 28(2), 117-121.

The New London Group; Group, The New London (1996). "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures". Harvard Educational Review. 66 (1): 60–93.

The New York Dramatic Mirror (1913), The Evolution of the Motion Picture: VI – Looking into the Future with Thomas A. Edison by Frederick James Smith, Page 24, Column 3, New York. (Old Fulton.

Tognozzi, E. (2010). Teaching and evaluating language and culture through film.

Italica, 69-91.

Smith, D. D. (1982). Teaching Undergraduate Sociology through Feature Films.

Teaching Sociology, 10(1), 98–101.

Washburn, G. N. (2001). Using situation comedies for pragmatic language teaching

and learning. TESOL Journal 10(4), 21-26.

Zyubanov, V. Y. (2003). Using multimedia technologies during the English as a

second language classes based on "LINGUIST" complex.

Short Descriptions

Multimodal collaborative writing has become increasingly prevalent in the advent of technology-enhanced language learning, yet scant attention was paid to the verbal and on-screen interactions between learners during the construction process. This study narrows the research gap and investigates three pairs of EFL learners’ interactions when completing a multimodal collaborative writing task in an English for Academic Purpose (EAP) course. Using a multiple case-study approach, I intend to examine the dynamics of peer interactions through their interaction patterns, utilization of semiotic and multimodal resources and functions of languaging.

Short Descriptions

The TLIP gamification grant team will review the pilot of the Course 3 electives (LANG 1003, Spring 2022) and start revising the electives for Spring 2023 (CORE 1403).

Possible Benefits

A key objective for this project is to create new and innovative materials that make the best use of technological and pedagogical practices for the blended learning format in Course 3. The project will explore how gamification provides intrinsic motivation to complete online tasks and activities as well as to introduce and synthesize core competencies and learning areas in the course.

Deliverables

A report reviewing LANG 1003 Spring 2022 electives; a plan (with CEI) for Fall 2022 revisions of Articulate files; some revisions of Articulate files.