Faculty Publications and Conference Presentations

This study probes into the effects of a local kindergarten teacher’s pronunciation on her students’ interest in English language learning. It also 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 deeply entrenched in our cultures. This study aims to explore how we can change this unhealthy and misperceived self-worth in language teachers and tap into the rich resources from our L1 & L2 learning experiences into teaching experiences. A kindergarten teacher with 11 young learners were interviewed. Though the initial results show the non-native pronunciation of the teacher negatively affected students’ interest in learning, this study has raised an awareness to address the generally non-RP standards of kindergarten teachers in Hong Kong. Further studies are suggested to investigate how language educators can help develop kindergarten teachers as language professionals through teacher training programmes.

How human beings perceive the world through our five main physiological senses and how such perception is encoded in the human languages are intriguing yet challenging in linguistic studies. Considering uneven studies of Chinese sensory language compared to other Indo-European languages, this study takes the initiative to replicate Strik Lievers and Winter (2018)’s perspective of investigating sensory lexemes distribution across lexical categories, to examine the relationship between Mandarin Chinese sensory lexicon in terms of their parts-of-speech and the five senses. A list of 1,369 sensory related lexemes with annotated lexical categories and sensory modalities were compiled. The quantitative method was used to explore the correlation between sensory modalities and part-of-speech distributions. Chi-squared test yielded a significant result with the p-value<0.05, suggesting a strong relationship between these two categories and the existence of asymmetrical distributions in lexical categories among different senses. In addition, correspondence analysis was conducted, and the result suggests vision is the only sense associated with a high proportion of verbs, taste and touch are more associated to adjectives, while smell and hearing are found preferring nouns. But given there exists a large amount of “deverbal” nouns in auditory sense (occupying 58% of all the nouns), it suggests hearing tends to be more ‘verby’ instead of ‘nouny’. In view of the time-dependency features associated with different lexical categories (see Givón, 1979; 2001[1984]), this study goes further to discuss the ‘time-variant’ in each sense. We adopt Huang (2015; 2016)’s ontological endurant/perdurant dichotomy in which a concept which can be defined independent of time is endurant, and a concept which must be defined dependent of time is perdurant. Since some formal syntacticians suggested lexical categories could be decomposed to +N/+V features, i.e., nouns as [+N, -V], verbs as [-N, +V] and adjectives as [+N, +V] (Haegeman 1994, p.146), Huang (2016) claims that +N feature stands for endurant properties, and +V feature stands for perdurant properties. By decomposing words and linking such features to endurant/perdurant dichotomy, it is possible for us to suggest a ‘sensory endurant/perdurant scale’, on which smell is seen as the most endurant sense, touch and taste are in the middle, while hearing and vision are viewed as the most perdurant modalities.

Oral input has been identified as a key factor in children’s second language development. In the context of kindergarten education, oral input comes mainly from teachers in the classroom setting. For the investigation of oral input in classrooms, a structured observation scheme is needed for systematic data collection. This paper presents the development of an observation scheme for pronunciation input. The scheme is based on the Input Quality Observation Scheme by Weitz, Pahl, Mattsson, Buyl and Kalbe (2010), which was developed to record the input quality of teachers. It was adapted to observe specifically the pronunciation input in classrooms, including the factors related to the characteristics of a teacher’s pronunciation input (e.g. intonation and verbal reinforcement), and the promotion of listening comprehension. It also records children’s output, such as the amount of words used in a second language and the output characteristics (e.g. intonation and use of new words for interaction). The observation scheme was piloted in a Hong Kong kindergarten for examining the English pronunciation of teachers and children in the classroom. Two lesson observations were conducted in a K2 class with eight children and a K3 class with 19 children, both of which were taught by local Chinese teachers. The lessons were conducted fully in English with rich oral input given. Despite the teachers having near-native English proficiency, there were features of pronunciation commonly found in Hong Kong English in the teachers’ pronunciation; and similar pronunciation features also occurred in the children’s output, suggesting that they were influenced by the teachers’ input. Based on the results, further developments of the observation scheme are discussed.

Description of flavours of desserts often involves a rich range of vocabulary. This paper investigates the real-life language describing tastes of desserts in Mandarin Chinese, extracting data from Dazhong Dianping, the most popular restaurant review website in China. Using the Sketch Engine as the primary tool to extract collocations, we found that ‘mouthfeel’ and ‘personality’, instead of direct descriptions of TASTE or SMELL, are the most dominant expressions. In particular, more than one hundred ‘mouthfeel’ words are identified, with strong tendency of positive polarity. The majority of ‘mouthfeel’ terms are tactile (sense of touch) in nature, which shall be considered as synaesthetic metaphors to depict TASTE. Moreover, these ‘mouthfeel’ words often collocate with words connoting pleasant personality, especially in terms of warm social interactions. In summary, due to its intensional rather than physical telicity, description of desserts shows significant cultural variations. On the one hand, the preferred words still retain the same telic purpose, i.e., to please the mouth; on the other hand, instead of using expressions conveying intensional bodily pleasure (sensuality/sexuality), Chinese focus both on the parochial bodily experience (pleasing the mouth) as well as the social-interactional (pleasant personality) to describe desserts.