Faculty Publications and Conference Presentations

Staff and Student Wellness

This descriptive case study probes into the effects of a local Hong Kong Chinese kindergarten teacher's pronunciation on her students’ classroom interactions in English language learning. It also describes and examines the teacher's own perceptions of pronunciation competency as a language professional. In Asia, many non-native L2 teachers suffer from the "native-speaker fallacy" due to our historical and colonial backgrounds. A huge inferior complex element is still deeply entrenched in our cultures. This study aims to explore how we can change this imbalanced and misperceived self-worth among language teachers and tap into the rich resources from our L1 & L2 learning experiences into our current teaching experiences. To draw a compare and contrast model, two kindergarten teachers (Native English Speaker (NS) & Non Native Speaker (NNS)) with 36 young learners (K3) were interviewed and observed. Though the initial results show the non-native pronunciation of the teacher negatively affected or confused students' interactions in English language learning, this study has raised an awareness to address the generally non-RP standards of kindergarten teachers in Hong Kong.

The benefits of using digital storytelling are well documented in the literature. Whether and how these advantages can be extended to digital story-writing, especially for young learners, remains underexplored. Recent advancement in technology has the potential of streamlining the stages of planning and revising in a process approach to second language writing. The present study examined how English teachers in two Hong Kong primary schools adopted a process approach to teach digital story-writing. They planned eight writing lessons for 10 Primary 3–4 classes. Students were taught to use Google Slides to write their stories on iPads and complete a recording in small groups, which were then published on an online platform. Findings from focus-group interviews, lesson observations and student writings revealed that students were highly engaged in the lessons, and their writings also had fewer grammatical mistakes. However, they rarely engaged in meaningful dialogues during group work, whilst some teachers also expressed concerns about time constraints and their own readiness to use digital story-writing, which may hinder successful implementation of this innovative approach in classroom settings. Implications of how digital story-writing can be effectively deployed on young learners are discussed. © The Author(s) 2021.

Expressing emotion is considered essential in the U.S. business communication tradition; however, its importance is uncertain beyond the U.S., and more specifically, in Chinese business contexts. This study explores emotion in U.S. and Chinese business communication through the analyses of attitude markers in the shareholders' letters of U.S. and mainland Chinese corporations. The analyses reveal that while emotion is embedded in the discourse of companies from both cultural models, its expression is more frequent and intense in the U.S. texts. The observed dissimilarities are discussed in terms of underlying sociocultural factors. Implications arise for the teaching and learning of business communication which are still largely defined by U.S. approaches. With the rising prominence of mainland Chinese corporations worldwide, the findings provide strong evidence for students and professionals to understand Chinese as well as U.S. rhetorical styles in business communication in order to be better prepared for the global business environment.

Although analysis is an essential skill for academic success, many students find it difficult to write analytically. Some resources exist that explain the features of an analytical text, but few resources have been translated into materials that teachers can use straightaway in the classroom, making their evaluation an underexplored area. This classroom-based study aimed to answer a research question: To what extent is task-based language teaching of analytical reports reflected in students’ assignments? Six units of task-based teaching materials were developed for an undergraduate technical communication course, which was taught to an intact class of 18 engineering students. The students then wrote an individual report analyzing a real world engineering ethical case. All the assignments were collected and analyzed, drawing on a genre analysis framework that examines macro level features (e.g. generic structure) and micro level features (e.g. vocabulary and grammar). Results show that the classroom instruction and materials had a positive impact on students’ performance. Most of them were able to structure their reports effectively, using the essential moves and steps and incorporating key lexical items (e.g. vocabulary of causation) and grammatical features (e.g. conditional sentences). A few students did not follow the template, choosing to take the notion of genre more flexibly. Teaching implications are explained.

Bilinguals’ attitudes toward their languages can be a major source of linguistic variability. However, the effect of attitudes on crosslinguistic phonetic interactions in bilinguals remains largely unexplored. This study investigated the possibility of such effects in Cantonese-English bilinguals in Hong Kong (n = 26). Participants produced near-homophones in each language on separate days. Formant values of Cantonese [ɐ] and English [ʌ] and degrees of diphthongization of Cantonese [o] and [ai], and English [oʊ] and [ai], were analyzed as a function of language proficiency, use, and language attitude scores drawn from a background questionnaire. Participants’ attitudes toward Cantonese were predictive of the acoustic difference between similar Cantonese and Hong Kong English (HKE) vowels: More Cantonese-oriented speakers produced greater acoustic distance between crosslinguistically similar vowels. No effects of English attitudes, proficiency, or use were found. These results demonstrate that bilinguals’ attitude toward their native language can affect the degree of phonetic similarity between the two languages they speak.

The current study employs a contrastive approach to analyze five consonantal features (TH stopping/ fronting, L vocalization, [n, l]/[s, ʃ] conflation, /r/, /v/, /w/ substitution and consonant cluster modification [CCM]) of Hong Kong English (HKE) from 37 online sound clips from 29 speakers. Compared to the traditional contrastive approach, the current study uses a world Englishes paradigm to analyze the data, which aligns more with the recent movement of world Englishes. The result shows that all the five features exist in the corpus; however, TH-stopping/fronting and CCM are more common than others. The results behind the features in HKE could be hinted from the comparison with Cantonese, the L1 of Hongkongers. Moreover, the results help to develop the categorization of HKE speakers—Hong Kong English Continuum—which potentially facilitates the discussion of HKE under the world Englishes paradigm in the long run.

The current article presents a state-of-the-art review of research on the social factors that have been found to impact how learners acquire and use a second language (L2) sound system. These factors include ethnic group identification, gender, and study abroad experience. The research synthesis presents the key findings on each social factor, with examples drawn from the cited research for illustration. The article then presents recommendations for pedagogical practice. These recommendations are aimed at both teachers and learners, and for use both outside and inside the L2 classroom; they include examples and links to free online resources that both teachers and learners can use to enhance meaningful L2 pronunciation teaching and learning.

Recent years have witnessed a rapidly growing trend of incorporating synchronous online teaching tools into language teaching, yet the interaction patterns that unfold in online environment and its effectiveness on young learners remain underexplored. The present study narrows this research gap through closely examining the multi-modal exchanges between a veteran primary teacher and his EFL Grade 6 students during synchronous online English lessons, using a video-conferencing tool called ZOOM. 80 recordings from whole-class and small-group sessions over a four-month span were obtained and the various modes of synchronous computer-mediated communication that the teacher employed as well as spoken discourses were analyzed. The findings indicated that the teacher successfully utilized the affordances provided by ZOOM to elicit a large number of non-verbal responses and expanded verbal responses from students. The better-able students also demonstrated remarkable interactional skills during small-group sessions, as seen from their increased use of prompting and repair speech acts. Students’ reticence emerged as an alarming concern, though it was alleviated by extending the wait-time. Overall, this study offers a prototype for primary teachers to base upon during synchronous online lessons, whilst also highlights the need for re-conceptualizing the constituents of classroom interactional competence (CIC). © 2021 Elsevier Ltd