Faculty Publications and Conference Presentations

The final stage of curriculum innovation for the four year degree program at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology was the development of specialized department-based English courses for senior undergraduate students in the School of Engineering. These students are in their fourth year of study and have built up considerable subject expertise. The Center for Language Education has developed four such courses for Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Industrial Engineering and Civil Engineering. All these courses include an academic component, preparing students to write and present on their Final Year Project, as well as a professional communication component, but all have to be tailored to the specific academic requirements of the department, and cater for differing professional contexts after graduation. We report on some of the issuesinvolved and the challengesfaced, in designing specialized courses, using authentic materials, to meet specific purposes. Questions which arose included: how specific should the materials be given that within the same department, academic projects may be extremely varied? How should we handle professional communication, given that students may enter a variety of occupations after graduation? Our resolution of such issues may be applicable to curriculum developers facing similar challenges in other institutions.

This paper investigates the relationship between what English language textbooks teach in relation to a specific linguistic phenomenon, and what language learners know. The phenomenon selected for investigation is the distribution of the quantifier any, which is considerably more complex than textbooks (perhaps quite reasonably) show. Typically, textbooks indicate that any should be used in questions and in negated sentences (e.g. (1a), (2a)). However, formal linguistic analysis shows that it is negative meaning, and not just negation in the form of the morpheme not, that plays a key role in licensing any. This is illustrated in (3a), (4a), where there is no overt negator, but the words deny and hardly are semantically negative and therefore license any, in contrast to (3b) and (4b) where the verb or adverb are not semantically negative and any is not grammatical.