RECENT FOCUS

On 7 September 2022, PolyU signed a cooperation agreement with the China Accreditation Test for Translators and Interpreters (CATTI) Management Center (CATTI Management Center) of the China International Communications Group (CICG). The agreement authorises PolyU to organise the CATTI test in Hong Kong, with a view to uplifting the professional standard of Chinese-English translation in the city. The first Chinese-English translation and interpretation tests will be held in Hong Kong on 5 and 6 November by the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies. Click HERE for more details.

The English Across the Curriculum (EAC) Team led by Dr Julia Chen(EDC), with Dr Grace Lim(ELC) and collaborative members from CityU, HKBU and HKUST has received the UGC Teaching Award (Collaborative Teams) this year.

EAC initiatives over the past few years include workshops for discipline teachers on students’ writing problems, briefings for students to guide them on writing and speaking assignments, organising and co-organising conferences, publishing papers with discipline teachers and the development of a mobile app (Capstone Ninja) with language/writing/speaking resources for students.

PolyU’s Arts and Humanities is ranked 73rd globally in the 2023 Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings by subject, leaping over 20 spots from last year and breaking into top 100 for the first time. The Faculty will continue to strive for excellence and to fulfil our core missions of nurturing talents, discovering knowledge, and impacting the society.

THE uses 13 performance indicators that measure an institution’s performance which are grouped into the areas of teaching, research, citations, international outlook, and industry income. The relative weightings of these criteria vary slightly from discipline to discipline.

The President, Acting Dean of the Faculty, and representatives of our Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies met with the Secretary for Education, Dr the Hon. Christine Choi, during her visit to the University on 5 September 2022. The Secretary for Education and her delegates were introduced to facilities of the Speech and Language Sciences Laboratory and our research projects including developing a social robot for speech prosody training in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder, and identifying neurocognitive markers for typical language development and language disorders in children.

Dr Renia Lopez, Associate Professor of ENGL, has been awarded a one-month study-stay at the University of Alcalá (Spain) under their prestigious programme Giner de los Ríos, established in 2015. Under this programme, renowned scholars are invited to work with Alcalá’s researchers to explore new topics and develop international co-operations.

Dr Lopez has been working on with scholars and students at the University of Alcalá for a few years now and is currently working on a second project which evaluates the benefits of online teaching when the teacher's grammatical explanations are presented with or without gestures. Among the new co-operations she will explore is a study on the affective elements of the foreign language teaching and learning process. Dr Lopez will also be giving talks to students and staff at Alcalá as well as exploring the opportunities for further collaborations and possible exchanges between the University of Alcalá and The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Currently Head of Human Computation at the CTO Office of Bloomberg LP, Dr Enrico Santus is being honoured for his professional achievement in the domains of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). He was granted the Hong Kong PhD fellowship to pursue a PhD in Computational Linguistics at PolyU, followed by three years of postdoctoral fellowships at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He has been dedicated to the research and application of AI for various purposes including sentiment analysis, fintech, healthcare and fake news detection.
Click HERE to view his video.

10 students of the Faculty were honoured at the University’s Entry Scholarship Award Ceremony 2022 held on 21 September. These 10 scholarship awardees are as follows:

AI Zixin (BA (Hons) Scheme in Linguistics and Translation)
AKHTER Ishita (BA (Hons) Scheme in English and Applied Linguistics)
BOONPOG Natcha (BA (Hons) Scheme in English and Applied Linguistics)
CHEUNG Chin To (BA (Hons) Scheme in English and Applied Linguistics)
CHU Wing Kiu (BA (Hons) Scheme in Linguistics and Translation)
HO Nam Wai Tinky (BA (Hons) Scheme in English and Applied Linguistics)
LEUNG Kwan Yi (BA (Hons) Scheme in Linguistics and Translation)
SHI Samantha Monique Zhang (BA (Hons) Scheme in Linguistics and Translation)
WANG Xinran (BA (Hons) Scheme in Linguistics and Translation)
ZHANG Shuying (BA (Hons) Scheme in Linguistics and Translation)

Our ENGL student Tinky Ho, who represented Hong Kong at the Tokyo Olympics, delivered a speech on behalf of the awarded undergraduates, sharing her excitement of joining PolyU, and expressing her appreciation to the PolyU community for their support.

To align with the University’s Strategic Plan on learning and teaching, the Faculty has created a page on its website recognising our outstanding educators. Recipients of our Faculty Awards were invited to share a message with their students and fellow colleagues. Click HERE to view the page.

EVENTS

• (14 November 2022) PolyU 85th Anniversary: Distinguished Lectures in Humanities - Rethinking Environmental Issues: the case for intergenerational equity (to be given by Prof. Michael Nylan, UC Berkeley)
• (19 November 2022) PolyU 85th Anniversary Performance cum Putonghua Recitation and Demonstration Workshop
• (25 November 2022) PolyU 85th Anniversary: Distinguished Lectures in Humanities - The Democratization and Technologization of Expertise and their Consequences (to be given by Prof. Srikant Sarangi, AAU)
• (9-10 December 2022) The 6th International Symposium on Chinese Language and Discourse (6th ISCLD)