The Department has held the 8th International

Congress on English Grammar (8th ICEG) from 12 – 14

January which is one of the celebration activities for

the 75th Anniversary of PolyU. With the past seven

congresses took place in India since 1999, the 8th

ICEG has also set a history for being held in Hong

Kong.

Professor Christian Matthiessen, Head of ENGL;

Professor Geoff Williams, Honorary Professor, Faculty

of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney,

Australia and Emeritus Professor, University of British

Columbia, Canada; and Professor Eija Ventola,

Professor of Business Communication, Department of Communication, School of Economics, Aalto

University, Finland, gave theme-setting plenary speeches for the Congress.

Over 70 participants came from different regions around the world, including Hong Kong, Algeria,

Australia, China, Finland, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, South Korea and The

Philippines. About 40 papers were presented on the topics of Curriculum Design and Development,

Discourse Analysis, English Grammar, English Language Teaching, English Linguistics, Globalisation

and Language, Language and Education, Social Linguistics and Systemic Functional Linguistics.

The four collaborating institutions of the 8th ICEG, namely English and Foreign Languages University

(India), De La Salle University (Philippines), Shenzhen University (China), and Sun Yat-sen University

(China), have also sent some of their PhD students to participate and present at the Congress which

was an invaluable experience for them. The 9th ICEG will be organised by De La Salle University and

will take place in the Philippines.

President Professor Timothy W. Tong welcomes participants to the Congress.

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Highlights

Plenary speakers and Prof. Tong (From right) Professor Geoff Williams, Professor Eija Ventola and Professor Christian Matthiessen.

pg3Bilingual Teacher Training Programme for Chang’an University

pg4Flamenco Dance Performance at PolyU International Week 2012

pg5Grants Awarded for Research Projects

pg6BAESP Student Received the “Most Outstanding PolyU Student” Award

8th International Congress on English Grammar (12 – 14 January 2012)

Participants of the Congress

One of the parallel presentation sessions

ENGLinkSpring 2012Newsletter of the Department of English The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

www.engl.polyu.edu.hk/facebook

The seminar was divided into two parts which were conducted by Professor Geoff

Williams from the University of British Columbia and University of Sydney, and Dr Diane

Potts from Lancaster University. They emphasised a general model of the ‘pedagogic

device’ developed by Basil Bernstein; it comprises the underlying general principles

through which specific pedagogic discourses can be produced. Prof. Williams stated

the key features of the model, and the use of it to elucidate relationships between

‘local’ and ‘school’ pedagogic discourses, which was also Bernstein’s original sociological

interest. Dr Potts drew on the resources

of the model to analyse the attempts by

British Columbia teachers to participate in

public accountability discourses on literacies education. She also discussed the potential

for research in fields of recontextualization, where competing discourses with their

associated practices for legitimating knowledge contest for space and preference.

Event Highlights

The English Binominal NPs: A Usage-Based Perspective (11 January 2012)

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Departmental Seminars

Professor Jong-Bok Kim, Professor at School of English and Director at the Center

for the Study of Language of Kyung Hee University in Seoul, gave a seminar

based on the corpus search of the Binomial NPs (BNP) data by using Corpus of

Contemporary American English (COCA). Some basic properties of the BNP

construction were reviewed by focusing on its headedness, semantic relations, and

the role of the preposition of. In particular, Prof. Kim showed that English BNP is

a nominal juxtaposition construction whose special syntactic constraints are linked

to semantic relations like a subject-predicate relation.

Phonology for Listening – Dealing with Hotspots (22 February 2012)

The seminar conducted by Dr Richard Cauldwell from Speechinaction in

Birmingham, United Kingdom stressed on one of the problems of our listening

methodology, the avoidance of the difficulties of fast speech. By identifying the

hotspots, the moments of fast speech which are difficult to hear, Dr Cauldwell

demonstrated a practical way to teach English learners to recognize words that

they know in the acoustic blur of fast speech through an iPad application Cool

Speech: Hot listening, Cool Pronunciation.

Linguistic Research Uses of Basil Bernstein’s Model of a ‘Pedagogic Device”: 1 & 2 (21-22 March 2012)

1.

2.

3.

The Faculty of Humanities (FH) held the Erasmus Mundas

MULTI-2 Global Selection Meeting in early March which was

attended by 14 scholars from the consortium partners of

Erasmus Mundas. Representatives from Universita di Pisa and

University of Sevilla were invited to visit the Department of

English on 7 March and met with some of the academic staff

to discuss opportunities on future collaboration. The meeting

with Universita di Pisa involved exchanges of research interests

on corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, semantics and

phonology and phonetics while the one with University of

Sevilla focused on Spanish programmes.

Erasmus Mundus (EM) is a flagship European Commission

programme promoting international education. PolyU has

been awarded an accumulative total of nearly €2.6 million in

2010 by the European Commission’s EM Mobility Grant in two

consecutive years to promote academic exchange through a

large-scale scholarly language project. Twelve universities in Europe and South East Asia have formed a consortium and they will

collaborate on the project “MULTI – Multilingualism and Multiculturalism” spearheaded by FH. This project “MULTI” is also the first

and only EM Mobility programme offered to postgraduate students and academic staff members in South East Asia and Hong Kong.

3

Department Updates

Exploring Collaboration Opportunities with Erasmus Mundas Partner Institutions

Representatives from the two universities and the Department have fruitful discussions.

Bilingual Teacher Training Programme for Chang’an University (12 – 16 March 2012)In December 2011, Dr Gail Forey, Dr Marvin Lam and

Miss Angela Tse delivered a 5-day intensive teacher-

training programme in Xi’an to the professors from

the School of Highway at Chang’an University, Xi’an.

The programme involved a follow-up visit to PolyU for

some classroom observations and the group obtained

this practical experience in March.

The programme in PolyU included class observations

on university English for the Faculty of Construction

and Environment (FCE). The group attended a course

developed by the English Language Centre (ELC)

before they did the observation in classes under

the Department of Civil and Structural Engineering

(CSE) and the Department of English (ENGL). In

addition to the pre-observation briefing and post-

observation discussion delivered by Dr Gail Forey, the

three teachers from our Department also conducted

presentation sessions which the professors from Chang’an University reported back the research project assigned to them in the

intensive programme in December.

During the training in Hong Kong, the Chang’an University group also took the chance to do some shopping and sightseeing in Hong

Kong. They went to the Ocean Park and had a scrumptious seafood lunch in Lamma Island.

About 30 academic staff from Chang’an University participated in the programme in PolyU.

4

Department Updates

Opportunities to Expand Spanish Knowledge

We would like to thank all the Spanish students for their

enthusiasm and willingness to participate in events organised

by the Spanish speaking community of Hong Kong this

semester:

Four of our students (Denise Chan, Ching Ching Cheng,

Christina Chan and Nicola Lee) volunteered to help in the

Mexican Consulate one day a week, amongst other things

they helped to prepare a photo exhibition about Mayan

culture. We hope we will be able to continue our relationship

with the Mexican Consulate and organise more events with

them in the future.

A number (too many to list) of students helped at the

Spanish Fair, an event organised by the Spanish Chamber of

Commerce.

In addition three of our final year students (Nicola Lee, Irene

Leung and Connie Fan) will be interviewing with the Spanish

Consulate for the Spanish Consulate Award for the best Spanish student in PolyU (this award will take into account the overall grades

of students over the four semesters as well as their performance in a debate – in Spanish! – and their written proficiency). The

award, funded by the Spanish Consulate in Hong Kong and organised by the Spanish subjects coordinator, Renia Lopez, will consist of

US$1,000 to be spent on Spanish related activities.

Thanks to the Spanish Consulate we were also able to organize the II Spanish Video Competition for ENGL225 students. The Spanish

Consul General presented the prizes: a HK$1,000 voucher and some audiovisual material in Spanish. The winners, Yvonne Lui and

Karen Leung, produced an excellent promotional video of the Sheung Wan district, whilst the runners up , Iris Chan and Coco Leung,

described the Mongkok area.

This semester we also had various external speakers including: The Consul General of Mexico, Ms Buenrostro; Mr German Muñoz, who

spoke about cultural awareness; Ms Pérez, who presented on Barcelona; and Ms Villaescusa, from HKU, who talked about Spanish

Phonetics.

The Consul of Spain presents prizes for the video competition to the winning students.

Flamenco Dance Performance at PolyU International Week 2012 (9 February 2012)

The Department took part in this year’s PolyU International Week

(i-week) by staging a flamenco dance performance Sol Y Flamenco on

9 February. Sol Y Flamenco is the first and only authentic flamenco

music and dance group in Hong Kong. The group gathers artists with

serious flamenco background, all trained in Andalucía (Spain) — birth

place of Flamenco. An audience of about 70 was able to experience the

passionate aspect of Spanish culture at the performance.

The second year of i-week was held from 6 to 11 February which offered

15 activities planned and presented by PolyU students and academics

as well as other supporting organisations. The theme of this year was

“Global Citizens” which is one of the distinctive features of PolyU’s

four-year undergraduate curriculum to nurture students into all-round

global citizens.

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ResearchGrants Awarded for Research Projects

Professional Development for teachers, teaching through English 1.With the recent changes in the medium of instruction (MoI) in Hong Kong, the

Education Bureau have funded professional development for teachers in teaching

through English across the curriculum. Dr Gail Forey and a team of colleagues have

been awarded funds to offer professional development workshops for teachers

who are involved in teaching their subject through English. They have recently

been awarded HK$1.3 million to run a project for Technology, Art and Physical

Education teachers (TAPE) and another HK$1.3 million to run a similar more general

course for Competence in Academic English (CACE). They are very fortunate to be

collaborating with John Polias from Lexis Education to offer these courses (www.

lexised.com). The first TAPE Course took place in December 2011, and in total 120

teachers will attend the two courses over the coming two years. Feedback so far

seems to be very positive and they look forward to working with the teachers,

offering support and learning from them at the same time.

In-service Professional Development Programme: Short Course on Raising Secondary School Teachers’ Competence in Academic English for Teaching Non-language Subjects in the English Medium (Ref. EDB (RP) 3410/44/11(1))

Funds awarded by Education Development Bureau, Government HKSAR

Amount: $1,287,000 Date: March 12 – Aug 14

In-service Professional Development Programme: Short Course for Secondary School Teachers on Teaching the Key Learning Areas of Technology Education, Arts Education and Physical Education in the English Medium (Ref. EDB (RP) 3410/38/11(1))

Funds awarded by Education Development Bureau, Government HKSAR Date: Sept 11 – Aug 13

•

•

2012-2013 LTTC-GEPT Research Grants2.The 2012-2013 LTTC-GEPT Research Grants awarded by the Language Training and Testing Center in Taiwan, through open

global competition, to Professor David Qian (Principle Investigator) for the project entitled: A Register Analysis of Advanced

GEPT Examinees’ Written Production. Prof. Qian is one of the two recipients for the grants and the funding amount for his

project is HK$250,000.

The grants are intended to assist external researchers in conducting quality research on topics related to the General English

Proficiency Test (GEPT) in order to further enhance the reliability and validity of the test. GEPT targets English learners at

all levels in Taiwan.

News on the Research Centre for Professional Communication in English (RCPCE)

Technology, Art and PE Teachers Attending the PD Course Dec 2011

Talk on Professional Communication in Engineering (3 March 2012)

Professor Winnie Cheng was invited to deliver a talk at the Contract

Management “2012” seminar on 3 March 2012. The seminar, held in Chiang

Chen Studio Theatre, was organised by Young Groups of The Hong Kong

Institution of Engineers, Chartered Institute of Arbitrators East Asia Branch,

The Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers Hong Kong Branch,

The Hong Kong Institute of Surveyors, Institution of Civil Engineering, and the

Hong Kong Law Society. The title of the talk is “Professional communication

in engineering: A corpus study of engineering language”.

6

Students and Alumni News

BAESP Student Jennifer Zhang Received the “Most Outstanding PolyU Student” Award

Jennifer Zhang Xinyu, a final year student of BA (Hons) in

English Studies for the Professions (BAESP) programme has

been awarded the top award of “Most Outstanding PolyU

Student”. She is the first student in the Department and

in the Faculty of Humanities won this prestigious award.

The award was presented to her at a ceremony on 8 March

where other five PolyU students received The Outstanding

Student of Faculty Awards at the same time.

We are glad to have Jennifer sharing her university life and

happiness in getting this award. Perhaps you can also grasp

the ‘secret’ of winning this award from her sharing!

Almost four years ago, as a freshman full of ambitions for my university

life, I had hundreds of dreams about how I would spend my years at PolyU.

But I had never dreamt of winning this prestigious award. I really want to

express my sincere gratitude to the English Department for nominating me

and giving me the opportunity to compete with top students from other

Departments and Faculties.

I was lucky enough to have identified my academic passion right from

the beginning: languages and communication. The flexibility of study

mode provided by the Department enabled me to choose the courses that

are most suitable for my personal development. I also made use of the

flexibility by incorporating my other activities into my timetable. In the

past three years, I entered two table tennis and badminton tournaments

as well as three singing contests. Although it might sound too much like a

cliché already, “Work hard, play hard” is really the secret force to my decent GPA.

What I am most grateful for in the four years is my overseas experiences. I had the chance to work in the US for one summer

in 2009 and to study in the UK at the University of Southampton as an exchange student in 2011. In the US, I worked as

a cleaner at an amusement park. This experience taught me to be strong and optimistic when circumstances are not that

favorable. Going on exchange in the UK as a student was a totally different story. Thanks to the long one-month Easter holiday

in Britain, I travelled with my two classmates to continental Europe

and visited eight countries. For all the students who are expecting

an unforgettable experience abroad, my advice is to fully integrate

themselves into the local life and never be afraid to try new things.

For my career aspiration, I hope to become a professional interpreter

on the international scene. The language and communication skills that

I have gained from the English Department are indispensible for my

future career. Apart from my Major in ESP, I also minored in Translation

and took relevant subjects to get me prepared. I’m happy to share with

you that I will be studying Conference Interpretation at the Monterey

Institute of International Studies in the United States after I graduate

from PolyU.

My four years at the Department of English has been wonderful and I truly am thankful to all my instructors and the warm-hearted

staff. I also want to send my best wishes to my fellow students in the Department. Wish you all an unforgettable U-life!

Jennifer receives the “Most Outstanding PolyU Student” award from President Professor Timothy W. Tong.

A gathering with some of the BAESP classmates in Southampton during the exchange in the UK.

Jennifer participates in a singing contest

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Students and Alumni News

An Enhanced Understanding in Service Learning – Sharing by The Community Chest

About 20 students taking the subject of Teaching English as a

Service Learning Experience were able to obtain a close look of the

social welfare services situation in Hong Kong, thanks to the sharing

session done by The Community Chest of Hong Kong on 16 March.

During the session, students learnt about the work of the Chest,

how donations have been utilised, and the services subvented by

them. One of the member agencies of the Chest, Hans Anderson

Club, also introduced their story-telling service for young children.

They explained to the students the necessary skills required for story-

telling that will help young children to develop positive attitudes.

With the implementation of the four-year curriculum starting

September 2012, PolyU will introduce a credit-bearing “service-

learning” requirement in the curriculum. All undergraduate

students are expected to apply the knowledge and skills acquired

from their studies to serve the community.

Students have active discussions on making use of story books to educate young children.

PhD Student Awarded Sir Edward Youde Memorial Fellowship

One of our research students, Jim Chan, has been awarded the prestigious Sir Edward Youde Memorial Fellowship for the academic

year 2011/12. Jim was one of only ten research students across Hong Kong who received the award, which aims to encourage and

assist local full-time postgraduates in their research. Jim received the award from Lady Youde, wife of the late Governor Sir Edward

Youde, at a Concert-cum-Prize Presentation at City Hall on 11 March. The award is well-deserved recognition for Jim’s outstanding

academic achievements and selfless service to the community in recent years.

Jim gained distinctions in two of ENGL’s MAs (English Language Teaching and English Language Studies) while working as an English

and Science teacher at a secondary school in the New Territories. He commenced his PhD studies in September 2010 under the

supervision of Dr Stephen Evans and Dr Cathy Wong. Jim’s project focuses on the choice of an appropriate pronunciation model for

the Hong Kong classroom. The results of his research

will be of immense theoretical and practical value for

ELT specialists in Hong Kong and other contexts in

which English is being taught and learned as a second

or foreign language.

As a former secondary school teacher, Jim believes

that it is pertinent to bridge the gap between what

is found to be theoretically sound and the practical

needs in everyday teaching. ‘I am very pleased that

the Sir Edward Youde Memorial Fellowship this year

is awarded to an empirical study in applied linguistics

(and partly in sociolinguistics) in that it recognises

the important contribution of humanities research to

society,’ Jim said, ‘and, crucially, it also indicates that

research in the social sciences and humanities, though

traditionally regarded as ‘‘soft science’’, is equally

valuable to that in ‘‘hard sciences’’ such as natural, physical and computer sciences in the 21st century’.

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Students and Alumni NewsBrazilian Exchange Student Enjoys the Technological Based Approach of Learning English

Marisa Nascimento, a student from Pontificia Universidade Catolica

(PUC) Sao Paulo, is the first Brazilian student who joined PolyU

through the program Science Without Borders (CsF). After a few

months at PolyU, Marisa said she was warmly welcomed and has

adapted well to the new environment. “Studying in PolyU is a very

great opportunity because it has a nice structure where you can

have many cultural activities and at the same time to learn from

highly educated people from all over the world,” said Marisa.

The technological based learning approach of the Department of

English is another aspect that impressed Marisa. She emphasized

English is a common language in the contemporary society and the

subjects of the Department allow students to understand how the language connects to the world nowadays. The contact with tutors

and experience of working with local students in projects and assignments provided immense help with her study.

Marisa finds she can obtain support for her research interest in multimodality in the Department as it has a very important development

in this field. In the next few months, she intends to write an MA research project to be submitted to PUC to work under the supervision

of Prof. Leila Bárbara - who is her undergraduate supervisor - and Mr Francis Low of the Department. In January, she was also given an

opportunity to present her research project at the 8th International Congress of English Grammar to the participated local and overseas

scholars which was a valuable experience for her.