Faculty Publications and Conference Presentations

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

The aim of this project is to replicate part of the research by Joyce, Ky and Eric, “Syntactic Complexity and Writing Quality in Students’ Technical Writing”, which was conducted with students in the School of Engineering.

The syntactic complexity of student writing in LANG2070 was investigated to determine what differences exist between levels of proficiency. This is so we can better understand where and how students’ academic writing can be developed and whether differences exist in the syntactic complexity of student writing between the disciplines of Engineering and Humanities and Social Sciences. For this project, the focus is on the complexity of noun phrases. 

A corpus of 12 student texts (1100 to 1300 words each) from 4 teachers on LANG2070 was created. The corpus contains 4 texts each from high, middle and low levels.  Each level was then analyzed using an automatic syntactic complexity tool to determine three measures of syntactic complexity.

Initial results show some difference in use of noun phrase complexity between the levels.  The next stages involve manually analyzing concordances from the corpus to determine the types of complex noun phrases used across the three levels and then compare this to the original research by Joyce, Ky and Eric.

Short Descriptions

My fourth project for the summer is another research publication I have been working on. I plan to finish writing it up and submit it to a top-tier journal for publication. Here is my abstract: This article details the syntactic variation in Hong Kong English observed in college student essays. The essays were produced by 79 students in 4 different sections of an upper-intermediate English language course at a research university in Hong Kong. The students were asked to write two reflection essays evaluating the efficiency of the course and their own performance. Out of 158 300-word reflection essays, 48 essays (i.e., about 30% of the total number of essays) were randomly selected and analyzed. The analysis revealed two general patterns, each with 5 sub-categories. The first general pattern was the omission of various grammatical forms in obligatory contexts such as the omission of the indefinite article, definite article, the subject relative pronoun, the copula in a relative clause construction, and the past tense marker. The next general pattern was using certain grammatical and lexical forms with intended meanings not found in English. These included using "will" with a past tense reference, using "will" with a past tense habitual reference, using "will" with a present tense habitual reference, using counterfactual conditionals instead of factual conditionals, and finally using an "although…but" construction. Although the attested usages of English were all ungrammatical in standard English, those different constructions never led to a communication breakdown as the intended meaning in each context was successfully conveyed. That leads to an interesting question as to whether such forms are on a path to be grammaticalized in Hong Kong English. The article ends with a discussion on the dichotomy between descriptive and prescriptive linguistics, as well as pedagogical implications of the findings.

Summary of the Article

Previous language attitude research in Hong Kong compared Hong Kong English (HKE) to exonormative standard Englishes, whereas this study uses five varieties of HKE with more or less localised features. One hundred English language teachers were listener judges in a verbal-guise experiment, and the results showed that most of the speakers received positive evaluations, particularly on solidarity dimensions. The speaker with most local features received the most negative evaluation, but the difference was most evident on status dimensions. Thus, speakers of HKE are seen as likeable, competent and proficient, which suggests that Hong Kong may have entered into the nativisation stage of Kachru’s (1983) model. We argue that the recognition of HKE demonstrated in this study should have implications for English language teaching. We propose adopting pedagogies grounded in local language and culture, which would encourage students and teachers to express themselves in localised English, and express a local identity.

Reference

Ladegaard, Hans J. and Chan, K. L. R. (2022). Teachers’ attitudes towards varieties of Hong Kong English Implications for English language teaching. English World-wide. Advanced Online Publication. https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.21060.lad

Short Descriptions

We are a group of teachers who enjoy teaching science communication genres and trust that via doing text analysis we can get to know more about these genres and their stylistic features, use of vocabulary and syntax.

Possible Benefits

There will be positive washback effects to teaching, material writing and gaining credibility from students if we know the science communication genres that we teach well.

Deliverables

-text analysis frameworks -text analysis data - useful findings for writing materials for teaching Lang3024, Lang3025 (& Lang2010, maybe)