RECENT FOCUS

The Research Centre for Chinese History and Culture of PolyU, established on 17 January this year, successfully held its inaugural event last week.

PolyU was honoured to receive strong support from Tsinghua University’s Rixin College and School of Humanities, and the University of Macau’s Faculty of Social Sciences and Faculty of Arts and Humanities. Approximately 70 teachers and students from the three universities gathered in Hong Kong to participate in the five-day exchange programme, during which they also attended the unveiling ceremony of the Research Centre for Chinese History and Culture. In addition to lectures, participating students were tasked with writing a 3,000- to 5,000-word paper on three topics related to Chinese History and Culture. Students then presented their papers for discussion with instructors and peers. The Research Centre arranged excursions for teachers and students to cultural sites including the Sheung Wan Heritage Trail, West Kowloon Cultural District, Hong Kong Palace Museum, Tai Kwun and The Peak. These visits provided first-hand experience of Hong Kong’s modern historical and cultural developments. Read MORE.

The Office of the Faculty of Humanities has moved to Room 503 of the PolyU Hung Hom Bay Campus on 7 June 2023. Our phone numbers remain the same after the relocation. We look forward to welcoming you to our new office. Click HERE to view the map.

Our PhD student, LAM Yiu Shun Wilson, has won the Runner-up award (second prize) in the first PolyU Three Minute Thesis (3MT®) Competition taken place on 30 June 2023.

Wilson is also one of the winners of the first-ever Faculty of Humanities Three Minute Thesis Competition held earlier on 14 June 2023, which was a great success with our PhD students presenting to the audience their exciting research. The winners of the FH 3MT are as follows:
Champion: WANG Yunyun Karen(ENGL)
First runner-up: LAM Yiu Shun Wilson(CBS)
Second runner-up: XU Wandong(CBS)

The 3MT Competition, developed by the University of Queensland, is an academic competition that challenges postgraduate students to present their research in just three minutes, using one slide. The competition aims to develop students’ communication and presentation skills, particularly in the area of research communication.

Organised by the Department of English and Communication (ENGL), the first-ever PolyU Undergraduate Conference on Applied Linguistics and Language Studies (PolyU-CALLS) was held on Saturday, 4 March 2023. The inaugural event, held on campus, was a resounding success, with over 100 students from PolyU and other universities in Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area participating in the conference. PolyU-CALLS 2023 featured research presentations by undergraduate students as well as plenary speeches by ENGL faculty members Prof. Dennis Tay and Dr Anne Schluter. In keeping with the conference’s focus on showcasing the work of ENGL undergraduate students, the conference was supported throughout the day by more than a dozen undergraduate student volunteers. Click HERE for more details.

Dr Emmanuele Chersoni, Assistant Professor of CBS, won the Outstanding Paper Award at the 19th Workshop on Multiword Expressions (MWE 2023) with his collaborators. The winning paper is titled “Are Frequent Phrases Directly Retrieved like Idioms? An Investigation with Self-paced Reading and Language Models”. The paper looks into the question of whether non-compositional multiword expressions like idioms and compositional-but-frequent word sequences are processed differently.

The MWE 2023, collocated with the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, was held on 6 May 2023. Click HERE to read the full paper.

Following our success in the first round of the Teaching Development Grants (TDG) 2022-25, three additional projects are funded in the second round exercise:

- AI-assisted and Inquiry-based Chinese Language Learning (PI: Miss Sarah WONG(CLC))
- GPT and AI: Empowering HKPolyU students (PI: Mr Adam FORRESTER(ELC))
- Exploring European Culture in Metaverse (PI: Dr Renia LOPEZ(ENGL))

The eight projects funded in these two rounds of exercise have received a total funding of over HK$2.2 million.

Previous research in Hong Kong has consistently found that people have negative attitudes towards Hong Kong English (HKE) and prefer standard American or, even better, standard British English voices, which have been rated significantly more favourably than HKE in virtually every study that has been published on the topic since the 1980s.

A new research paper titled “Teachers’ attitudes towards varieties of Hong Kong English: Implications for English language teaching” published in English World-Wide (online first) by Prof. Hans J Ladegaard(ENGL) and Dr Roy Chan, former postdoctoral fellow in the Department, has found that attitudes towards HKE in the City are changing. Click HERE to read more.

Prof. Li Ping, Chair Professor of Neurolinguistics and Bilingual Studies and Dean of Faculty of Humanities, was invited to the Elsevier Life Science Journals Editor Gathering on 29 April 2023 in his capacity as Editor-in-Chief of Brain and Language and presented with the “Elsevier Dedicated Chief Editor 2023” award. Elsevier journal editors from China gathered in Shenzhen to discuss the latest marketing and publication trends and strategies. Vice President Peter Lee from Elsevier Science Publisher and Elsevier Shenzhen Office hosted the meeting, and researchers along with other Chinese editors of journals in life science participated in the meeting.

EVENTS

• (28 August 2023) Launch Ceremony of Yuen Ren Chao Prize in Language Sciences