Faculty Publications and Conference Presentations

In response to the demand for more flexible and learner-centred forms of education and training, shorter forms of learning opportunities are being developed across European and US universities in the form of micro-credentials. This suggests a move away from the traditional semester-long core or elective courses with 6-12 credits that universities have predominantly offered so far. The idea of micro-credits is based on the premise that varying degrees of learning can happen many times throughout the day or week but that these require materials and delivery, testing, and validation in bite sized, skill-focused chunks. Virtual and blended-learning formats such as MOOCs and SPOCs that students can enroll in in their own time from the convenience of their own location, can further facilitate acquisition of micro-credits. Hong Kong higher education broadly, and English language teaching Centres more specifically, have yet to seriously consider this trend. However, this may possibly be one of the key directions in which the future of language education is headed. This talk outlines how a micro-credit system can be adopted at language centres to enable students to customise their learning pathways based on their own personal, academic and professional needs. For example, a student keen to improve his/her English-speaking skills may earn a certificate in English pronunciation through a one-week summer programme, and earn a badge in public speaking by rehearsing for and participating in a Toastmaster’s event, both of which can count towards the accumulation of his/her micro-credits.

As schools and universities invest more in technology-enhanced learning, podcasts have become an integral part of this pedagogical change. Podcasts can be used as authentic materials to engage students as well as to improve teaching and learning practice. Consequently, education researchers and practitioners alike have highlighted the benefits of incorporating podcasts in the classroom to improve students' language skills, particularly listening and speaking. Inspired by this trend, our Digital Literacy Team at the Centre for Applied English Studies in HKU applied for the Virtual Teaching and Learning Grant last year and received a sum of HK$ 1,000,000 for a project titled 'Expanding student-teacher engagement to support digital media production needs of teachers in virtual teaching and learning environments'. As one of the deliverables of this project, a new elective course in podcasting has been designed for undergraduate students. The main goal of this course is for students to gain communicative competence through the process of producing a podcast suitable for their chosen audience. It is expected that students will improve their English language skills (through script/commentary writing, and interviewing guests and engaging in dialogue with them) while simultaneously developing their ability to communicate through a critical digital medium. As a result of this digital literacy, students who take the course could potentially be recruited to help out with related digital initiatives at the University, thereby providing a stronger infrastructure for sustaining and expanding the role of 'Students as Partners', a notion that has gained much momentum in higher education globally. In this talk, I will outline the different steps we've taken towards the completion of the project thus far, elaborate on our vision of creating this course on podcasting, and share our insights on the extent to which students' communicative and digital expertise can be improved, and the degree to which the course can technically enable them to act in the capacity of partners, alongside teachers, in various digital endeavors at the University.

The genitive marker 的 li55 in Chongqing Mandarin can also function as a coordinating conjunction. This function develops from the usage of li55 to link numbers or quantities in calculations. Several restrictions are found on the coordinator li55, e.g., conjuncts must be nominal and shall be all the members of a definite set; li55 must be used between every two conjuncts and can only be used in informal registers. Similar coordinate function of genitive markers can also be found in other Sinitic languages while rarely seen in other language families, which merits further typological investigations. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown teachers and students into the deep end of virtual learning environment overnight. It has been a real “to sink or swim” scenario for school administrators, teachers, parents and students. After tackling the initial technical issues like securing the digital infrastructures for all the stakeholders in the virtual learning environment, we then have to face and yet another uphill battle which is constantly recalibrating ourselves emotionally to the new mode of interacting with each other. A typical daily struggle for a high school teacher would be teaching in front of a sea of dark screens. Students are reluctant to interact with one another in the virtual learning environment and easily fall into the habit of turning off their cameras during online classes. Recent research shows virtual classrooms have been perceived not so effective as real classrooms (Mok, 2020). The paper probes into how individualized consultations could shed some light and hope to break the silent virtual classrooms. In my study, four individualized consultations were given to two groups of university students in their language courses. The feedback from students was largely positive and changed the “face-off” situations in the virtual classrooms.

The possessive marker 的 li55 in Chongqing Mandarin can also function as a coordinator. This function develops from the usage of 的 li55 to link numbers or amounts in calculation. Several restrictions are found on the coordinating function of 的 li55, reflecting its original usage: the conjuncts must be nominal; 的 li55 must be used between every two conjuncts; it can only be used in informal registers; the conjuncts must be all the members of a definite set. The coordinating function of possessive markers is also found in other Sinitic languages, while rarely seen in other language families, meriting further typological investigations.

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.

Human sensory and emotional systems contribute to cognitive processing in reflecting internal bodily experiences and representing the external world. A proliferation of behavioral and neurological studies has tapped into the effects of sensorimotor and affective information in semantic processing (e.g., Newcombe et al., 2012; Pulvermüller, 2005). Despite that considerable evidence of recruiting sensorimotor mechanisms in language comprehension has been posited, the interaction between sensorimotor and affective systems coded in semantic processing is still an underexplored topic. It is also important to note that emotions are weighed differently across sensory modalities—taste and smell are claimed to be the most “emotional senses” (Mantel et al., 2021). This neurological finding is further attested in the English lexical repository, given that taste and smell lexicons were found to contain more emotional contents than the lexicons of other senses (Winter, 2016). This study aggregated perceptual strengths across six sensory channels (i.e., vision, hearing, taste, smell, touch, and interoception) (Zhong et al., 2022) into affective ratings (i.e., valence and arousal) (Xu et al., 2021) to investigate the interaction between sensory modalities and emotional valence-arousal dimensions in Chinese. Our findings suggested that smell and interoception, considered the two sensations directly linked to emotional processing, are more emotional and can elicit higher arousal levels than words associated with other senses. This study demonstrates the differentiation of emotional information across different sensory modalities and provides further insights into the interplay between sensation and emotion as manifested in the language.

The prevalent public health measures against the spread of the COVID-19 disease like social distancing guidelines are necessary but they can make us feel isolated and lonely. Young people are even more vulnerable. The World Health Organization (WHO) has repeatedly issued warnings over youth mental health. Medical professionals have acknowledged the existence of COVID-induced stress and its insidious creep into the fabric of student life. Sadly, open discussions on mental health issues are often viewed as a form of weakness, if not a taboo, among students. Our exploratory project aims to re-socialize students through a collaborative mobile app (StudyBird) to boost mental health literacy and its support networks on campus. The concept of StudyBird is similar to a taxi-hiring app which connects randomly available students (both local and international students) to perform their shared social/sports/learning activities together. Once students shared their locations and activities, the system will automatically match the closest students with similar shared activities together. Without the interference of the human preferences (e.g. staying with your own kin), our app promotes and allows students from diverse cultural backgrounds to meet and mingle with one another. The preliminary results from the three test groups (n=29) indicated positive user feedback, especially about enlarging their social networks in their trusted environment, i.e. our campus. Activity matching in the app and stability of our app is yet to improve. Data analytics has been performed continuously by applying machine learning technology to the data on backend to help students predict their learning progress.