Faculty Publications and Conference Presentations

Short Descriptions

It is now commonplace for oral presentations to be recorded. Teachers record student presentations for grading and feedback as a regular practice. Students often have access to their own presentations in video format for reflection. It is also easy for students to use videos in rehearsals to serve as a basis for further improvements. Applications such as VEO provides a means to track important moments in a video so that personal and peer review can be built on. There has also been the emergence of automatic feedback tools, such as Speaker Coach of Microsoft, that might offer assistance to speaking skills training. Despite this wide availability of various technologies, it would still seem that teachers and students are not fully making use of such tools. A reason could be teachers themselves are too busy to learn about the technologies available. Another is ways to integrate such technologies into day-to-day teaching have yet to be found. Such integration also has to be attractive to students so that they are willing to use it. It is with these considerations that the scholarship project is proposed. The researchers intend to survey existing technologies that can be used to review / reflect on oral presentation performances and thus to explore the usefulness of different tools by applying some of them to review student oral presentations of LANG2030/H. The study will also explore oral presentation skills that specifically address the strengths and shortcomings of year 2 engineering students.

Possible Benefits

Findings of the study can inform the course development of LANG2030.

Deliverables

Summer EYE - short paper session

Summary of the Article

COVID-19 has influenced teaching all across the globe. The massive use of online learning has created a problem with teachers because of the differences between face-to-face teaching and online teaching. In this chapter, a discussion on how traditional face-to-face teaching differs from online teaching will be shown. How education in Hong Kong is affected by COVID-19 is also summarized. Additionally, the result of a case study in a linguistics course in a university in Hong Kong will be shown to demonstrate the attitudes of students regarding online learning. The mixed-method case study, which consists of survey data of 100 students and semi-structured interviews of eight students, showed that students hold a general mixed feeling towards online learning because of its drawbacks, such as lack of interactions despite the convenience that online learning provides. This chapter ends with a list of suggestions for online teachers.

Reference

Chan, K. L. R. (2021). What teachers should and shouldn’t do during online teaching: A case study in university setting. In C. H. Xiang (Ed.), Trends and Developments for the Future of Language Education in Higher Education (pp. 166-186). IGI. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-7998-7226-9.ch009

This article is available at HKUST library.

Have you ever come across a student who can speak with impressive fluency and accuracy or write with complex sentences and advanced vocabulary but is unable to grasp the nature of a task and cannot accomplish the goal as required by the assessment?   If you have, you may be looking at an issue with ‘functional adequacy’ (FA).  

FA can be understood as “the degree to which a learners’ performance is more or less successful in achieving the task’s goals efficiently” (Pallotti, 2009, p. 596) as well as “knowledge and employment of both linguistic and interactional resources in social contexts” (Révész et al., 2016, as cited in Bui and Wong, 2021). These definitions challenge the assumption that a student’s L2 performance is largely a matter of linguistic competence.  Without FA, a student, however proficient in the target language, may flail or even fail in pragmatic communication.

In order to link this pragmatic competence to the choice and quality of linguistic forms produced by a L2 student, there has been calls from TBLT (task-based language teaching) researchers (Pollatti, 2009, Kuiken & Vedder, 2017) to add FA as a separate component to the measurement of L2 performance in the widely accepted CAF (complexity, accuracy and fluency) and the more recently proposed CALF (complexity, accuracy, lexis and fluency) framework.   In so doing, the existing CALF framework will expand and become CALFFA where FA can be measured by “content, task requirements, comprehensibility and coherence and cohesion” (Kuiken & Vedder, 2017).  However, this latest framework is considered by some as merely a way to address FA in principle within the controlled environment of an assessment and there are bound to be issues to be dealt with once it is to be gauged in more ‘real-life’ communication.  Some issues with FA that linguist Bui (2021) has identified include whether and how a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic context may affect one’s FA and whether the generalized social appropriateness and a single idealized form as acquired in the classroom may affect one’s FA adversely over the long run and if so, how it can be corrected. 

To understand these issues, I participated in an investigation with a linguistic professor in a sister university this summer.  In this investigation, eight university students were asked to spot and describe the differences between two pictures of Western-style houses with features unfound in most Hong Kong/Asian contexts. They were also required to respond to a customer’s letter of complaint with limited time of reading.  They were divided into four groups with a varying level of difficulty and a different sequence of these two tasks.  They were then interviewed one on one about their experience.  Based on the transcripts, open coding was made at this stage and below are a few preliminary findings with some questions that I hope can spawn more discussions from our colleagues:

1.     Many participants are hindered by the unfamiliar concept or the vocabulary of ‘chimney’ in their descriptions; only a few are able to rely on paraphrases flexibly to get around it.  By comparison, many are much more familiar with the trouble-shooting procedure with dealing with a complainant whether they have had any real-world experience dealing with anything of such sort or not.  (What does this mean regarding the impact from the cross-cultural and context-dependent elements on FA in the assessment design?  Does it raise any question about whether a task successfully completed in one particular context necessarily predicts its equal competition in another context?)

2.     Many have not thought about a possible theme or a real purpose behind these tasks, only to have a sudden realization of them after being pointed out by the researchers.  (Would an understanding of them help one develop ideas more suited to the occasion and deliver better performance?  Would a purposeful mention help to enhance the retention of the learning points in teaching as well? )

3.     Many have observed the relative ease of structuring ideas in writing in contrast to the difficulty in applying that same skill to speaking.  (What is it that makes it difficult for students to transfer certain skills from writing to speaking or vice versa and what can be done to facilitate that transfer?)  

4.     Many predict better quality in their output if they could discuss the task (especially for the complaint one) with another participant in an exchange mode, compared to having to take it on all alone.  (What implications would this have for speaking assessments that may involve a pair or a group each time rather than the conventional one-on-one mode?)  

5.     When asked about the awareness of tone and formality and the use of a sequence and connectives, many have recollection of them having been taught in class but are unable to think of them on the fly or include them in their efforts expended to make the output more comprehensible for the audience.  (What does it say about the effectiveness of the teaching/learning of audience awareness to enhance comprehensibility?)

6.     Many have noted the lack of preparation time and have indicated more preparation may help them prepare the content in a better structure.  (Is the preparation time given in most assessments an arbitrary or logistically convenient one?  What is the ideal preparation time beyond which there would be minimal difference in the participants’ FA?)  

7.     Many have found it beneficial if the total number of points (information units in terms of content) to be covered can be mentioned in the instructions. However, there would be no such support in real-world communication. (Do we have a gap between the carefully controlled assessment and pragmatic competence? Do we find current teaching support sufficient to help our students to develop a way to quickly gauge the needs and the scope of a communicative situation without readily available information?)

8.     When asked if cultural background plays any role in helping or hindering their output, many have mentioned the benefit of having vicarious experience/exposure to certain features of objects or scenarios through TV or the Internet even though they are not brought up in that given culture.  (Considering the generation born and bred in the digital boom or the metaverse down the road, is vicarious experience/exposure as powerful as real-life ones to help students relate to certain subject matters?  How can teachers tap into such knowledge on the part of the students?)

9.     Many have found the task about spotting differences less challenging than the complaint letter one, citing the relative ease of description over having to come up with responses after critical thinking as the main reason.  They also see the spotting differences one as more language-based and the complaint letter task as more content-based and thus why the former is less difficult than the latter.  (What does this say about our students’ perception of content vs. language?  And more importantly, has FA, of which content is a component, been adequately emphasized in our teaching?)

10.  When asked if speakers (including native speakers of the target language) of a particular background have any advantage over other ones in the assessment, the participants have mixed responses as to whether proficiency takes precedence over familiarity with topics and themes (closely related to FA) or vice versa in the performance. (How do we emphasize FA in subject-sensitive language courses while striking a balance between subject content and language use?)  

References

Bui, G., &  Wong, C. H. (2021). From Linguistic Skills to Pragmatic Competence: The Role of Functional Adequacy in Task-Based Teaching and Learning. Asian Journal of English Language Teaching, 30, 61-76.

Kuiken, F., & Vedder, I. (2017). Functional adequacy in L2 writing: Towards a new rating scale. Language Testing, 34(3), 321-336.

Pallotti, G. (2009). CAF: Defining, refining and differentiating constructs. Applied linguistics, 30(4), 590-601.

To cater to the varied learning backgrounds, needs and diverse proficiency levels of the non-Chinese background students at the HK University of Science, since June 2021 onwards, the Center for Language Education has been designing the new Chinese curriculum. The new curriculum offers three speaking and listening courses and two reading and writing courses based on the results of the needs analysis. In order to boost students’ spirit of inquiry and facilitate collaborative and self-directed learning, blended learning is adopted in the instructional design of the five new courses. This study will introduce the blended learning design of the five courses including the course design process, the models and technology used, and will explore the challenges that the course developers are meeting in the design process.

<p>Most previous research has investigated how embodied cognition captures concrete notions (e.g. money), but the role sensory modalities play in more abstract concepts (e.g. time) lacks empirical research—in particular, how abstractness is grounded in perceptual experiences. In this paper, a sensorimotor strength rating study (also known as modality exclusivity norms) is conducted, to ascertain the sensory-perceptual information encoded in both concrete and abstract nouns in Mandarin Chinese. The preliminary results suggest that a sensation denoting one’s internal bodily feelings—interoception—captures more abstract information than the five basic human senses, and that the abstract concepts perceived predominantly by interoception mainly comprise object evaluation, mental, thinking, time, and space as their ontological domains. This study affirms the embodied grounding of the concrete and abstract concepts, and further sheds light on the grounded account of mind-body-interactions.</p>

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 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.