Faculty Publications and Conference Presentations

The aim of the project was to develop a range of mini-lecture videos in collaboration with discipline-based instructors and students in order to introduce key language competencies such as specific terminology, concepts, and skills to learners that they will be exposed to throughout these courses, in different lessons. This would help prepare them for the tasks set out in their courses and help them better understand the material in lectures and contribute to class or tutorial sessions.

The project designed and developed twenty-six mini-lectures for two core curriculum courses at Lingnan University: The Process of Science and The Making of Hong Kong. The videos were added to the course LMS platform where the students could watch the videos and complete pre-class tasks to reinforce their learning. Course professors and lecturers could also look at student rates to these tasks, including the answers given, to determine any areas that might need more focus.

To determine the content of each video, we talked to the content providers and to students who had previously taken the course as well as embedding student helpers in current offerings of the class. We hoped to bridge the gap of what they may know before taking the course and what is going to be covered in upcoming lectures and tutorials. These videos were mostly three to five minutes long but some more complicated material needed longer videos or a video series.

After the videos had been used for a term, we conducted a survey of the students to get feedback, as well as some interviews. The feedback was largely positive as the students found the videos useful, largely because of the autonomy they were given and because they could use them to review the material before class and prior to exams.

The course providers also found them quite useful, although to different extents. The Process of Science followed up this video suite by starting their own video production. The Making of Hong Kong had quite a large teaching group, some of whom liked the videos and others who were a little more skeptical. Some of those who found it useful also started to incorporate more of these videos and created more in other courses.

Examples of videos:

MiLEE The Process of Science Peer Review Unit 3 2.mp4

MiLEE The Process of Science Gummy Bear Experiment Unit 1 3.mp4

MiLEE The Process of Science Monty Python Unit 1 2.mp4

Collaborative writing skills are crucial to KS2 students. However, 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 content analysis and counting grammar mistakes, whilst collaboration skills 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 evidences to suggest that the novel pedagogy is effective in motivating students to engage in the writing task, yet explicit guidance on the collaborative process is indispensable.  This study is limited in its low generalizability to younger cohorts. 

Short Descriptions

The COVID pandemic has resulted in prolonged periods of primary school suspension and there is an abrupt shift to synchronous online teaching. Teachers should be equipped with the skills to seek for effective to sustain learning and teaching online. Writing skills are especially important for KS2 students, yet hardest to teach in online settings. Design: Use Google apps such as Google doc and Google slides to undergo the pre-writing, drafting, revision and editing. The final writing product is published in Book Creator, Seesaw or Glogster. Students discuss the writing on ZOOM’s breakout rooms under the scrutiny of their teachers. Data will be collected from 4 P6 classes in a primary school in Hong Kong.

Short Descriptions

COVID-19 transformed how university lectures were or are being conducted. Suddenly, teachers were required to step out of their comfort zone to learn to use new teaching technologies, adapt their teaching materials and start teaching online. Despite the convenience and protection from COVID-19, students did not seem to like the switch to online classes, expressing concerns that it caused a slip in their learning standards. Many reasons may have contributed to this perception. The proposed chapter aims to use qualitative method to investigate the following research questions: 1. To what extent are students satisfied with their synchronous online class experience? 2. What are students’ views towards the switch to online classes? 3. What difficulties did students encounter during online teaching? 4. What support do students need to support their online teaching? 5. What constitute best online teaching practices from the students’ perspectives? 6. Do students’ views of online classes vary by disciplines? Twenty-four clustered random samples will be taken from among the survey participants to proceed to the 30-minute online focus-group interviews. In the interviews, participants from each discipline will be asked to discuss the common and best practices of online teaching based on their own experience. They will also be asked to comment, in confidence, on several issues which often puzzle teachers, e.g., to what extent did they participate in class; whether and why they switch on their cameras; whether and how they contribute to group discussions in class; whether and how they maintain great communication with teachers and classmates. The interviews will be transcribed, annotated, and analyzed qualitatively using grounded theory. The preliminary study showed that students from different disciplines have experienced different degrees of learning difficulty because of the online learning environment. They reported that instructors did not provide sufficient assistance in online learning and the teaching practices were not adopted well on the online learning environments. This study attempts to identify different teaching practices used by teaching staff from different disciplines, which potentially sheds light on the students’ opinions towards online learning under the COVID situation and provides first-handed suggestions for teachers to structure their online lessons under all online learning settings. It is undoubtable that online learning has been taking over traditional learning methods even without the strike of the pandemic. Teachers should take the opportunity to prepare themselves for this long-awaiting change to the education field.

Possible Benefits

- Online Teaching

Deliverables

- Potential publication

Short Descriptions

This study explores how peer feedback is manifested in synchronous online settings and its impact on students' final products. The influence of mediating factors such as cultural beliefs would also be taken into consideration. The interaction data from ZOOM's breakout room will be transcribed and analyzed, and correlated with students' writing products.

Peer feedback has received scholarly attention for decades due to its intricate linkage with several schools of thought, such as Vygotsky's socio-cognitive theory, process writing or social constructionism . Recently, a new mode of feedback computer-mediated peer feedback saw its quick emergence thanks to rapid advancement of technology. Existing studies mainly placed the emphasis in asynchronous contexts such as text-based chatrooms, whether the effectiveness can be extended to synchronous online contexts with video-conferencing technology remains unknown. The influence of cultural factors and individual factors also merit attention. This study attempts to narrow the research gap and explores these issues by studying the real-time video recordings during synchronous online peer feedback sessions of EAP writing courses. We studied the interaction patterns of 20 pairs of undergraduates during unsupervised ZOOM breakout room sessions, and the quality of their final writing products were also examined. The results showed that students were generally willing to provide extended feedback to their peers, and they relied on multi-modal means, such as on-screen annotations to aid their explanations. However, the number of initiative turns and feedback did not appear to relate to the quality of writings. Yet, the ethnicity of the students played a role in mediating this process, as students from Asia were generally more willing to make revisions based on their partner's suggestions. Implications of these findings on EAP writing pedagogy were discussed. 

Short Descriptions

The assumption that most university students are digital natives has prompted more EAP and ESP courses to include computer-mediated collaborative writing (CMCW). Students are often assessed as a group for the quality of the final written product, and this sometimes creates disputes and discontent among students in my teaching context when some members are deemed less contributing than and by others. The growing practice of including self-and-peer-assessments to encourage independent learning and to counteract any irresponsible behaviours has inspired me to study their effects in motivating students in taking a more active role intrinsically and extrinsically, in the collaborative writing tasks. Possible research questions: 1. What interaction strategies do L2 speakers adopt during a computer-mediated collaborative writing task? 2. What are the motivational factors behind L2 speakers’ interaction in and contribution to the collaborative writing task? 3. What are the effects of formative self-assessment and peer-assessment on L2 speakers’ decisions on interacting and contributing to the collaborative writing task?

Short Descriptions

This study aims to examine strategies used by business professionals to engage readers through the use of specific linguistic devices. Hyland's (2001) engagement framework is applied to a corpus of U.S. letters to shareholders. More specifically, the framework explores audience engagement at the micro level of language use through inclusive pronouns, personal asides, appeals to shared knowledge, questions and directives.

Possible Benefits

Business communication guides and textbooks emphasize audience engagement as one of the keys to success of a business text. The study helps us to develop a better understanding of how this is done through specific linguistic devices in authentic business communication. The findings can ultimately help inform our teaching in the area.

Deliverables

The objective is for the study to be written up as a paper to be submitted to a journal.

Connecting with stakeholders to build goodwill with audience-centred messages is a key tenet of business communication.  Popular business communication textbooks offer guidelines such as constructing messages with a "you-attitude" and stressing audience benefits underlined by the acronym "WIIFT", or "What's in it for them".  While this advice is invaluable, nonetheless, they appear to reflect Mautner's (2017:612) observation that business communication beyond linguistic disciplines is often "couched in 'macro' terms, looking at broad themes" and that it is also important to examine such themes in discourse at a "micro" level by exploring specific linguistic devices used in their expression.  In response, this study explores how business professionals use specific linguistic devices to connect with their audience through the engagement framework (Hyland, 2001) which consists of the following:

Reader pronouns are the simplest and most fundamental way the audience is brought into the text and their presence acknowledged and include inclusive pronouns (e.g., we, our), second person pronouns (e.g., you, your) and the generic "one".

Directives instruct readers to perform physical or mental actions and include imperatives, modals of obligation and predicate adjectives expressing the writer's judgement of necessity or importance.

Appeals to shared knowledge prompt readers to recognise a claim as universal or commonly accepted.

Questions invite readers to an area or issue where a response or viewpoint can then be offered by the writer.

Personal asides are possibly the most deliberate and overt expression of engagement.  They denote interruptions into the ongoing discourse for the author to offer a comment that is largely interpersonal in nature.

The analyses reveal that business professionals use most frequently the reader pronouns "you" and "our" to connect with readers.  There is also meaningful use of directives and personal asides, but the use of questions and shared knowledge is minimal.

References

Hyland, K. (2001). Bringing in the Reader: Addressee Features in Academic Articles. Written Communication, 18(4), 549-574.

Mautner, G. (2017). Organizational discourse. In G. Mautner & F. Rainer (Eds.), Handbook of Business Communication: Linguistic Approaches (pp.609-628). De Gruyter Mouton.

Short Descriptions

My final project for the summer is an ethics workshop. I and Eugene Li are working on an "Ethics training in scholarship for CLE". We are planning to present this in our EYE event in August. We aim to particularly demonstrate how to use the new tick@lab website, and how to submit a Human Research Ethics Protocol.