Faculty Publications and Conference Presentations

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have consistently showed poor performances in reading comprehension. Extending from previous studies that presented pure-text, this study aims to test the performances of graphic novel reading. We tested 24 Chinese children who have been diagnosed as DLD and 24 typical readers matched with age and nonverbal IQ. These children were asked to complete a battery of tests assessing graphic novel reading comprehension and related visual-cognitive skills. The results of group comparison indicated that children with DLD performed similarly to the typical readers in graphic novel comprehension. Moreover, significant links between comic convention understanding and both passage and graphic novel reading were found in both groups. Our results imply the benefits of using graphic novel to facilitate reading to learn in children with DLD. (129 words).

This article reports a case study of an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher in Hong Kong who conducted lessons via Zoom during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study focused on the factors influencing her technology integration in synchronous online teaching mode. Using data from classroom recordings, stimulated-recall and semi-structured interviews, this study uncovered how Zoom functioned as a substitute for face-to-face lessons. The findings revealed that although there were fewer interactions between the teacher and her students, teaching in synchronous online mode provided the teacher with opportunities to utilize certain online features to augment methods of checking student understanding. The study identified the teacher’s pedagogical beliefs, the context and professional development as factors that influenced the level of technology integration in her Zoom classes. The study concludes that embracing process-oriented pedagogies may be necessary for a higher level of technology integration among ESL teachers who have adequate professional development opportunities and school support.

The practice of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) has been known to be troublesome to teachers. (Webb & Tierney, 2020). The authors argue that a mentoring approach based on threshold concepts in SoTL has the potential to lead to more confident conceptual border crossing by new entrants to the SoTL of English communication. A collaborative reflection by a departmental SoTL mentoring partnership was undertaken to identify changes in the mentees' knowledge of scholarship, context-specificity, and the development of expertise. The insights gained point to the efficacy of a knowledge- driven approach to academic mentoring for SoTL scholar development.

To create a more collaborative and communicative learning environment, digital tools are often looked to as possible solutions. Miro, an online whiteboard, is one such tool that allows students to easily share ideas and exchange information using a range of different media. Its strengths are its ability to allow real-time sharing and creation of ideas and information between learners and teachers using a host of multimedia. However, the numerous tools and options provided by the platform does come with a learning curve. Nevertheless, Miro is a useful option for encouraging collaboration between students, giving them a workspace to freely generate ideas and share resources. © The Author(s) 2023.

Linguistic synesthesia links two concepts from two distinct sensory domains and creates conceptual conflicts at the level of embodied cognition. Previous studies focused on constraints on the directionality of synesthetic mapping as a way to establish the conceptual hierarchy among the five senses (i.e., vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch). This study goes beyond examining the directionality of conventionalized synesthetic terms by adopting a Conceptual Metaphor Theory approach (i.e., the Conceptual Mapping Model) to test if conventional synesthetic directionality still holds when it comes to novel metaphorical expressions. The subjects, 308 native English speakers, are asked to judge the degree of commonness, appropriateness, understandability, and figurativeness in order to measure the degree of comprehensibility of novel synesthetic metaphors. Our findings demonstrate that novel synesthetic metaphors that follow conventional directionality are considered more common, more appropriate, and easier to comprehend than those that violate conventional mapping principles; they are also judged as more literal than those that do not follow conventional directionality. This study explores linguistic synesthesia from the perspective of comprehension of novel synesthetic metaphors, posits a pivotal position for mapping principles in synesthetic directionality, and supports an embodied account of linguistic synesthesia.

This study explores professionals’ construction of their multifaceted identities as representatives of their corporations in business writing. The self-mention framework is applied to explore the representation of the “business-self” which I propose encompasses the projection of individual, collective, and corporate identities. A corpus of 100 CEO's letter to shareholders was examined for the use of personal pronouns and company referential terms and collocation analysis performed to understand the surrounding discourse contexts. The findings reveal a distinct hierarchy of identities; US business professionals communicate with stakeholders by immersing themselves in the identity of the collective and make a concerted effort to project the corporate identity, whereas representation of the individual self is minimal. The study provides important insights into the identity construction work undertaken by professionals in authentic business texts and the findings can help inform English for Specific Purposes (ESP) practitioners of business communication courses in higher education. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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.

With the rise of multilingualism and the use of a local variety of English in Hong Kong, the current article proposes a framework for EMI teacher training for university teachers (WEMTT-Framework) to expose them not only to a theory of World Englishes but also a practicum of teaching in multilingual settings. Even though Hong Kong has been regarded as a trilingual (Cantonese-English-Mandarin) city where English is taught as a second language, the EMI teaching in Hong Kong is still highly exonormative-oriented. With an increasing number of studies revealing the possibility of EMI teaching with the help of multilingual and World Englishes elements, the current paper also explores how World Englishes and multilingualism help in the present EMI teaching environment. The framework and the discussion are not only applicable to Hong Kong but also places with similar multilingual settings, thus expanding to many Asian cities with colonial backgrounds. The paper ends with a call for action from educators and researchers to work on the implementation of teacher training and carry out further studies in different settings.

Purpose: Language learning is often conceptualized as a cognitive, psycholinguistic or pedagogical process confined to formal classroom contexts. Scant attention is paid to the autonomy of young learners in out-of-class situations. Methodology: Using an emic approach, this study attempts to fill the research gap by analyzing the visual and verbal narratives of 60 eighth graders in Hong Kong. A comprehensive coding scheme was developed to gauge their degree of autonomy and its intricate relationships with their out-of-class language learning experiences. Findings: Compared to their less autonomous counterparts, the highly autonomous learners are found to engage in more informal and solitary activities, set concrete goals that appeal to them and employ meta-cognitive strategies to facilitate their language learning. Originality: From a methodological standpoint, multi-modal narratives appear to be effective in tapping students' beliefs and experiences, as this allows the unobstructed flow of their own voices.