Faculty Publications and Conference Presentations

Study Focus

This study presented at the Psychology of Language and Language Learning on July 28, 2022 in London was to investigate introvert and extrovert university students’ perception of the use of interactive digital tools (such as Padlet and Mentimeter) in a face-to-face English for Specific Purposes (ESP) class after all classes in the university had been switched to online mode for three semesters.

Subjects and Methods

The subjects of the study were business students in LABU2040. The basic tool for data collection was an anonymous online survey, which included 3 required multiple-choice questions and 3 open questions (2 required; 1 optional) about the effects of interactive digital tools on their amount of contribution to the class discussions, their perception of the role of interactive digital tools to the sharing of ideas and whether the students considered themselves introvert or extrovert. The survey results were then analyzed qualitatively, particularly on the effect the use of interactive digital tools had on the amount of contribution to the class among introvert and extrovert students, their perception of a language class with and without digital tools and most importantly, the implication to educators about how interactive digital tools can be used (or not) to cater for the needs of the introvert and extrovert students.

Result highlights

•The use of interactive, digital tools resulted in an increase in the amount of contribution from students and the number of students who contributed to the class activities. They allowed anonymous responses to be given, making some students more comfortable sharing their thoughts.

•Introvert students tended to feel less pressured with the use of the digital tools and participated more in class without having to volunteer. They have expressed that this is an alternative that let them become more confident and ready.

•Extrovert students also said that the tool let everyone participate in class, even for shy people or when they are tired. They pointed out that the digital tools enable the ideas to be visualized and retrievable after class.

The pandemic has given educators various opportunities to use interactive digital tools in class, especially in an online environment. It is interesting for educators to explore the potential of such tools when classes are back face-to-face. This research thus offers the students’ perspective on using interactive digital tools in a face-to-face classroom. While a lot has been said about introverted students responding positively to digital learning online, the student's perception of their own personality collected in the survey and the digital impact tools have on their contribution to class may shed some light on the potential of interactive digital tools in a post-pandemic era.

Through my recent action research I adopted an exploratory and emic approach to learn about science student perceptions of scientific writing styles and issues in reader-writer relationships.  

The action research involved 167 volunteer UG science students. Their perspectives were collected in three stages through the semester of various UG science courses. In stage 1 a 10-question open comment online survey probed students’ beliefs about writing style and reader awareness in the context of scientific reports and published papers, and encouraged students to critique various sources of publicly available online guidelines for scientific writing style. In stage 2 a 25-question Likert scale online survey was used to attempt to quantify student views on common themes emerging in stage 1. This elicited the extent to which students considered important key concepts in writing style, the reader-writer relationship, and personal epistemology about the science. In stage 3 multiple informal group discussions enabled students to qualify and expand on responses provided in the previous stages.    

The findings have implications for pedagogy, materials and course design. These are detailed in a forthcoming book chapter. 

In particular my findings might be of use to the science team as they look to reviewing the current curriculum. With the recent implementation of the new UG LANG302x courses, our UG curriculum now focusses on science communication with the public, while the PG curriculum remains focussed on scientific communication with scientists. I believe that bridging the gap between these different UG and PG focuses is now an important consideration for CLE in the coming few years – especially to support our research-oriented undergraduate students and for postgraduates without a solid writing background. 

My findings led to the following recommendations for our science curriculum: 

1. The core competency of audience awareness can be more deeply embedded across the curriculum, particularly in the writing components of courses not just the speaking components, given its heavy emphasis throughout the literature of scientific communication to both lay and expert audiences.  
     
2. Materials can be designed to elicit the parallels between the reader experience and writing style more explicitly, and designed to raise awareness of the active role played by the reader in the reader-writer relationship.  
    
3. Materials can be designed to encourage students to interrogate their prior knowledge, in order to extend it, rather than relying on oversimplified rules learned in earlier years of their education. 
    
4. Discourse-level analysis of writing style (not just lexical-based advice) can be foregrounded at earlier levels of undergraduate study.  
    
5. The use and merits of published papers and lab reports as model genres for learning about writing style can be questioned. Selected samples can be more rigorously selected and more purposefully analysed. 
    
6. CLE colleagues can work with departmental faculty across the curriculum to integrate learning-to-write tasks and writing-to-learn tasks coherently and consistently into existing programmes of study, through embedded modelling, feedback and practice, both directly and indirectly. 
    
7. Focussing on communicating with the public can be a relatable way to develop transferrable skills in audience awareness. Reproducing assignments for different audiences – public versus expert – can be a useful route to raising awareness of the key skills. 

Short Descriptions

This study aims to investigate the acquisition of Cantonese as a 3rd language to improve the teaching and learning of the sound system, the morphology, the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of Cantonese.

Possible Benefits

Many individuals have challenges in acquiring Cantonese. Some don't even bother to start learning it. This project may encourage more students and faculty to take up Cantonese.

Deliverables

A number of research articles may be published in journals such as Second Language Research, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, etc.

Short Descriptions

While the three most discussed issues of the second language (L2) acquisition in Mandarin pronunciation are consonants, vowels, and tones (Chen & Tam 2020; Li 2017), learners can also have difficulties with rhythms and intonations. Such phonological features can also affect the comprehensibility and effectiveness of speech. Developed from my classroom teaching observations, this study aims to further the understanding of the patterns and errors made during the production of the prosodic focus of L2 Mandarin utterances by Cantonese speakers. Prosodic focus is achieved by means of prosody, for example, fundamental frequency, duration, and intensity (Wu & Xu 2010; Xu, Chen, & Wang 2012). It includes nuclear stress, emphatic stress, and contrastive stress (Lambrecht 1996; Feng 2013). Gu (2016), by conducting production experiments with target sentences containing nuclear stress or emphatic stress, including the stress in yes–no questions, found that L2 errors in fundamental frequency of Mandarin utterances produced by Cantonese speakers can be ascribed to negative transfers from their first language. However, the experiment did not involve contrastive stress or wh-questions. Based on my observations, some students fail to produce a “natural” performance when contrastive stresses appear in sentences, indicating possibly different patterns in Cantonese and Mandarin. Therefore, this study aims to investigate how Cantonese speakers produce prosodic focus in their Mandarin utterances by conducting a production experiment. Two groups of students, native speakers of Mandarin or Cantonese, respectively, will be recruited. The research questions will include the following: 1. How do speakers produce contrastive stress or stress the wh-questions in their native languages, either Mandarin or Cantonese? 2. How do native Cantonese speakers produce contrastive stress or stress the wh-questions in Mandarin? 3. Are there any differences between the Mandarin utterances produced by the two groups, and if so, why?

Possible Benefits

The potential outcomes of this study will have pedagogical implications for Cantonese learners that will improve their L2 Mandarin prosody, especially their ability to apply “natural” stress in contrastive sentences and wh-questions.

Deliverables

Preliminary findings will be presented within the CLE, if the situation allows conducting face-to-face experiments by summer 2022. The research will also be submitted to external conference and/or academic journals for publication at a later stage.

Short Descriptions

Reflection is an integral part of any practices of scholarship but reflection at a workplace is more dynamic than a practitioner's reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action. To bring the optimal pedagogical power of scholarship projects, dynamic reflection between practitioners is important. But how does it happen? What makes it happen? And what is causing resistance?

Possible Benefits

It's hoped that a literature review about reflective modals might help shed lights to the research question. I want to revisit the models of Dewey and Schon, and see what's new in the current literature.

Deliverables

- a literature review - suggestions to the CLE about 'reflective practices & scholarship'

Short Descriptions

While traditional face-to-face classroom practices and teaching are being used, computer-mediated activities are also heavily integrated into blended learning in the current higher education and professional training settings. The idea of the online portion replacing some basic face to face teaching highlights learning effectiveness and flexibility, which is promoted by the blended learning notion especially under the current pandemic. Indeed, teaching and learning effectiveness can be extensively affected by various external factors such as students’ level of attainment and learning background, with which experience also affects his/ her learning perception and psychology. They are some of the crucial factors determining the attainment through the notion of blended learning. The action research aims at investigating student’s learning perception and their learning background on influencing. The comparison between blended learning and fully traditional face-to-face can be even more vivid reference to indicate effective application of the blended learning notion in our course.

Possible Benefits

A key objective for this project is to investigate the following questions: How do curriculum design of blended learning in enhancing teaching effectiveness (learning objective) ? What are the different roles of teachers’ pedagogy between blended learning and normal class teaching ? How do the students’ perception of blended learning in affecting their own learning effectiveness (self evaluation) ? How do students’ level of attainment in determining their learning effectiveness through blended learning ?

Deliverables

The findings of the above questions shed lights on the way of improving student learning effectiveness and serves as a review to look at Huma1000 through better understanding of blended learning application. The result of the project will be presented through written report after data analysis.

Short Descriptions

Designing both assessment and curriculum that take students’ creativity and autonomy into consideration proves to be a significant challenge, especially at EMI Universities in Mainland China. This presentation will demonstrate good practices where the switch from the test teaching approach to a more scholarly-based approach was achieved and what impacts it had on students’ academic attainment.

Deliverables

EYE 2022 presentation

Short Descriptions

Kongish is defined as the Cantonese-English mix used by Hongkongers. When I first defined and explored this term, many including myself attempted to see how this practice fits under the paradigm of World Englishes - seeing Kongish as Hong Kong English, a mix variety-and community-based approach. While this provided a better explanation in explaining some dynamic natures of Kongish, but the theoretical assumption of community often implied the study of a shared practice instead of valuing distinctive features. Therefore, there has been a proposal of paradigm shift from Eckert. His three waves of sociolinguistic variations was used and positioned approaches such as World Englishes (and Hong Kong English in this case) under first and second waves. Eckert’s third wave emphasised how 1) variations constituted a robust semiotic system, 2) meaning of variables gained more specifics in the contexts of style, and 3) variations are both the reflection and the shaping force of social meaning. I noticed that the idea how social meaning was shaped by the variations as a force was often considered as an instantaneous, immediate process but not as a continuous, progressive state. As there has been a paradigm shift from the focus of named languages to the exploration of the practice produced by the speaker/understood by the listener, I explored the concept of languaging, in particularly translanguaging that how this theory may be a suitable approach in responding Eckert’s third wave and provide a better analytical lens for this Kongish project. Citing Li (2011)'s definition of translanguaging, he believed that the idea of translanguaging approach allows researchers to review how different linguistic structures and systems can interact within, and more importantly, beyond systems and structures, without being limited by the boundaries from named languages (such as English, Chinese, Cantonese) (2018), through the study of bilingual’s translanguaging space.

Deliverables

The outcome will be presented in the upcoming Sociolinguistics Symposium 24 and will be submitted for publication.

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