Faculty Publications and Conference Presentations

Short Descriptions

Being a mentor of a teacher-to-be, I realized that a mentee needs so much more than what is being taught in class or from lesson observations. It is interesting to find out from the mentees' reflective writings that they do have some worries or issues that refrain them from feeling comfortable and confident standing in a classroom and teaching in front of students. If we can identify these issues, it would be helpful for us to better design teaching materials for the mentees' specific needs and we could improve the way we coach our mentees in conducting teaching practice.

Possible Benefits

MAILE is a relatively new developed programme; it is obvious that it can be expanded further as we see a need for teacher training in the market. If we could provide more than theories from textbooks and offer customized help/coaching to our mentees, they will have more confidence in us. It will be good to see that our Center is not only a center that teaches Languages; but also a center that trains good language teachers.

Deliverables

Deliverable 1: Provide feedback to the coordinator by analyzing the reflective writing of four mentees (Three from Teaching English stream+ One from Teaching Chinese stream) Deliverable 2: Make suggestions on the implementation of the MAILE internship programme. Deliverable 3: Present the results in EYE programme.

Center for Language Education (CLE) has developed a competency framework for the university's languages curriculum, aiming at applying it into newly revamped Chinese and English common core courses in order to adapt to a new trend of higher education development around the world.

The new global environment of higher education has made new demands on future talents. As a Chinese teacher, do we need to re-considerate our future teaching career? Does our current teaching philosophy need to be updated? Does our expertise need to be improved? Do our professional skills need to be strengthened? Are we ready to guide students towards a series of new standards proposed by the competency framework for languages curriculum? A couple of questions mentioned above are actually more or less related to the future professional development route of ourselves.

The professional development of Chinese teachers refers to the cyclic process of teachers constantly reflecting on their teaching, summarizing experience and lessons from teaching practice, planning their future teaching, and then reflecting and planning again. According to Professor Ding (2022), the competence of Chinese teachers covers three aspects, professional knowledge, professional skills and professional practice. Professional knowledge refers to educational knowledge, knowledge of Chinese and linguistics, knowledge of Chinese culture and Chinese national conditions, knowledge of second language acquisition; professional skills refer to Chinese elements (pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar and characters etc.) teaching, Chinese language skills teaching, cross-cultural communication, educational technology; professional practice refers to classroom teaching planning, teaching resource selection and utilization, classroom organization and management, learning assessment and feedback. The last but not the least, in the professional development of Chinese teachers, teachers’ professional concepts cannot be ignored. Professional concepts refer to professional ethics and professional beliefs.

From my point of view, the professional development of teachers is the prerequisite of understanding learners’ competency development, and it is also the key to the effective implementation of the competency framework. Only by increasing teachers' awareness of the competency framework and improving their own Chinese teaching ability can the competency framework be better applied in teaching practice. The relationship between the Chinese teachers’ professional development and CLE’s competency framework for languages curriculum might be shown in the figure as attached. Therefore, participating in various kinds of scholarly work not only cultivates our academic thinking, but also helps us improve our teaching practices and enhances our professional knowledge and skills. Furthermore, the improvement of teachers' quality and teaching ability can effectively promote the development of Chinese learners' competencies in four areas.

References:

Anqi Ding (2022) A Virtual Seminar on Chinese Teachers’ Training and Professional Development, From CPGS Perspective, East China Normal University.

Center for Language Education (2022) Common Core Programme and CLE Sub-Competencies.

Center for Language Education (2022) HKUST Competency-based Assessment Framework for CLE.

Center for Language Education and Cooperation, China’s Ministry of Education (MOE) (2021) Chinese Proficiency Grading Standards for International Chinese Language Education (CPGS).

Summary of the Article

This chapter aims to provide a theoretical discussion on the possibility of implementing HKE into the local ESL curriculum, with the potential benefits to both teachers and learners within Hong Kong.The discussion further extends to whether the implementation could apply to other contexts globally. Along with other chapters in this book, the discussion will be conveyed in a more practical tone, which fits the need of both language practitioners and linguists. At the end of the chapter, an activity that includes a task-based guided role-play on CS will be introduced for teachers.

Reference

Chan, K. L. R. (2022). Code-switching in Hong Kong: Key to Implement a Hong Kong English Curriculum?. In C. Palmar and M. Devereaux (Eds.), Teaching English Language Variation in the Global Classroom: Ideas and Activities from Teachers and Linguists (pp. 132-141). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003124665-17

This article is available at HKUST library.

Short Descriptions

For two Summers I did ad hoc course writing for CORE1401 and the new LABU course, to fill in the Summer WUs. After seeing CLE's curriculum plan unfolds over these two years, I wonder if it's time to establish continuity and principles in this repeated pattern of my 'ad-hoc' Summer work, and to revive a framework used in the past - Communication across the Curriculum (CxC) - for course writing/curriculum development. The main objective of this foreseeably longitudinal project is to address the need of quality materials as models of communication for teaching and learning, a need which most of us course writers have tried to fulfill during course write-up. Especially when CLE/we have started teaching multimodal communication in the new Common Core courses, a rich collection of models of hybrid genres (written-oral-visual) can reflect not only our course objectives, but also the consistency of our curriculum requirements across years and disciplines. These are the rationales behind this E-Reader project - to collectively build teaching-learning resources in a levelled reader, which may start as subject-/discipline- specific that features key learning outcomes (CILOs), yet can further expand to include cross-course learning outcomes to showcase CLE’s curricular goals (PILOs of multi-modality and competency development).

Possible Benefits

As part of a search for "reading" materials for the new Advanced Business writing course, I wish to start the ground work of building a outcomes-based E-Reader as teacher-learning resources. I hope the project might interest colleagues who teach other school-based courses and who also consider updating course materials (communication models) to align with CLE's competency-based programmes.

Deliverables

(short-term) A theoretical framework for selecting-collecting texts of discipline- and rhetoric-specific genres from multimedia, for training of written communication (intended for the Advanced Business Writing course); (long-term) A E-Reader that provides teaching/learning resources across disciplines and levels, for multi-modal communication training (of writing, speaking, visual, and hybrid communication).

Short Descriptions

This is an established community of support and practice sharing. This Community is funded by a Teaching Development Grant from the Office of the Executive Vice-President & Provost. The community comprises faculty and staff interested in enhancing the intercultural learning experiences and competence of both PG and UG students at HKUST. This community was established to address issues raised in a study of UG students’ expectations of their intercultural learning experiences in 2017.

Possible Benefits

As the community has met over the past 2 years and developed its mission and objectives, issues associated with and strategies for fostering a mindset of diversity have emerged. It is believed that without such a mindset, intercultural learning experiences will be of little value, possibly even ineffective, and that it is unlikely that intercultural competence will develop. The community will build on work already done and continue to support achievement of the University’s strategic objective to be a champion of diversity.

Deliverables

In the next academic year we propose continuing activities that have proven successful in the past, including providing seminars/workshops and training with invited speakers and trainers, as well as sharing sessions among University colleagues. Engaging students as partners in some of these activities has also proved successful, and we would continue to engage students in our activities. One of these will be the Diversity = Strength film festival and student forum to be held in October (postponed from February).

Short Descriptions

To ensure the CLE Competency-based assessment descriptors match with the university common core competency framework, our team plans to review the existing CLE Competency-based assessment descriptors. Through this process, we hope to evaluate the language used in these descriptors and determine their effectiveness and usefulness in learning and grading.

Deliverables

CLE Competency-based assessment descriptors will be the framework to assist all course leaders to develop their course specific competencies descriptors to fit in their course assignments.

Short Descriptions

I currently have a research assistant from the MAILE program and we are working on replicating one of my previous research projects in which I investigated the development of conversational implicatures (implied meaning) in second language (L2) English. Here is the link for my prior publication: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/ip-2018-0011/html We are going to do the same in L2/L3 Chinese to probe into the question of whether learners with various L1/L2 backgrounds are able to comprehend implied meaning in L2/L3 Chinese. I plan to publish an article based on this project in journals such as Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Second Language Research, and Modern Language Journal. We could also present the findings for our students in the MAILE program and at various conferences in Hong Kong.

Short Descriptions

The current study reports on a preliminary investigation of two conflations in Hong Kong English (HKE) – [n, l] conflation and [r, v, w] conflation – which have rarely been examined in previous studies wherein the two conflations were considered to exist in “free variation”, the result of the limited HKE inventories (Hung, 2000; Sewell & Chan, 2010). However, by investigating a 5791-word mini corpus composed of speeches from 29 HKE speakers, it is believed that a loose pattern exists in the two conflations. This short report hopes to trigger further investigations in the study of phonetic features of HKE – which in turn may help the development of the variety of English in different scopes of scholarship.

Possible Benefits

- Pronunciation teaching (especially to Hong Kong students)

Deliverables

- Presentation at The 20th AsiaTEFL conference (August) - Potential publication

Short Descriptions

Email has been a common and important asynchronous communication medium between students and instructors in higher education since the 21st century. These 2 years, we even have more chances to interact with students using emails because of the suspension of face-to-face classes during COVID-19 pandemic. These chances made students’ mistakes in their emails, for example, problematic word choice, idiosyncratic formatting style, improper tone, etc., further noticeable. At the same time, it is hard to identify a good sense of politeness and appropriateness in their emails as it requires them to have a certain level of pragmatic awareness and competence. Apart from the limited exposure to and proper instructions on email writing, a second language learning environment adds an additional hurdle for students to write English emails effectively. This can be a serious problem because it not only hinders student-instructor communication at this stage, but also harms students’ construction of interpersonal and interprofessional relationships later in the workplace. All these factors led to this project. This project aims to raise our students’ awareness of netiquette by teaching them the crucial skills in email writing using a series of succinct, easily-accessible, and interesting animated videos that will be created after analyzing their problems and needs. After going through the videos and consolidation exercises, students are expected to write emails effectively and appropriately, and then be able to transfer the skills learned to other contexts and audiences.

Possible Benefits

- Blended learning - Effective communication/business English

Deliverables

Approximately 20 animated videos and their follow-up exercises (correspond to the topics) will be created according to 6 stages: - Raising Awareness - Building the Foundation - Prewriting - Writing - Revising & Reminders - Additional videos based on data analysis and viewers’ requests

Short Descriptions

To advance the pedagogy of DMC, this study proposes a set of product- and process-oriented classroom assessment rubrics that function as self-and peer-assessment tools for students when collaborating with each other to create multimodal texts in EAP contexts. Driven by the importance of reader-writer interactions in academic writings, the study first revised Jiang et al’s (2022) genre-based model for assessing DMC with reference to the importance of stance and engagement in academic discourse (Hyland, 2005) to assess the product of students’ collaboratively constructed multimodal academic blog posts. Storch’s (2002) notion of equality and mutuality were utilized to assess students’ collaborative process when engaging in DMC activities with peers. Then, the theory-driven assessment rubrics were tested and modified through classroom research during the process of guiding students to write academic blogs in an EAP course. The study aligns with the ongoing discussions related to the assessment of DMC and derives implications for appropriate classroom assessment mechanisms for DMC.