Research Interest/Output of New Academic Staff

FH Newsletter 2022/23 Issue 1

Research Interest/Output of New Academic Staff

Research & Scholarly Activities

Dr David J. LEBOVITZ

Department of Chinese Culture

Assistant Professor

Dr David Lebovitz is a philologist of early Chinese texts and traditions. He studies Chinese literature, intellectual history, and the formation of texts in manuscript culture, especially during the Warring States through Han periods (c. BCE 450–220 CE). In particular, Dr Lebovitz’s primary monograph project uses newly unearthed manuscript materials from the Warring States to illuminate collections, conceptions, and genres of verse formed during this time period, especially in relation to the canonisation of the Shijing, or Classic of Poetry.

Dr Lebovitz’s work has been supported by Fulbright, Fulbright-Hays, and Taiwan Ministry of Education funding. He has held fellowships and visiting research posts at Wuhan University, Tsinghua University, and Hong Kong Baptist University, where he was previously a postdoctoral research fellow.

Dr QIU Xuyan Christy

Department of English and Communication

Assistant Professor

Dr Qiu Xuyan Christy holds a PhD degree in English Language Education from the University of Hong Kong. Before joining The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, she worked at Hong Kong Metropolitan University. Her research areas include second language teaching and learning, task-based language teaching, English for academic purposes, and English-medium instruction. Her current research projects resolve around the design and implementation of second language oral tasks in the face-to-face and online teaching contexts. She is particularly interested in how to engage second language learners in interactive task performance in different teaching contexts. In addition, she has been collaborating with various scholars on small-scale studies in the fields of English for academic purposes and English-medium instruction. For example, she has carried out corpus-based studies of spoken discourse (e.g., Three-Minute Thesis presentations) to investigate what language knowledge and skills L2 users require in real-life academic scenarios. Her works have appeared in various SSCI-indexed journals, including Computer Assisted Language Learning, Language Teaching Research, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, System, and others.

Dr John ROGERS

Department of English and Communication

Assistant Professor

Dr John Rogers is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Communication. Dr Rogers was originally trained as a foreign language teacher, and, prior to moving to Hong Kong, he worked as teacher and researcher in a number of international contexts, including Europe, the United Kingdom and the Middle East. His research is empirical, the primary focus of which is how foreign languages are learned, and how they might best be taught. He has a particular interest in practice effects, and testing the degree that spacing and similar principles and concepts from the field of cognitive psychology generalise to authentic teaching and learning contexts. His research has recently received GRF funding as well as a Language Learning Early Career Research Grant. His research has appeared in journals such as Language Learning, Modern Language Journal, TESOL Quarterly, Applied Linguistics, and Studies in Second Language Acquisition, among others. His ongoing projects include projects examining the effects of expanding retrieval practice in online environments as well as aptitude-by-treatment interactions in incidental vocabulary learning.

Dr WONG Wing Sze Winsy

Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies

Research Assistant Professor

Dr Wong Wing Sze Winsy obtained her PhD degree and speech-language therapy qualifications in the University of Hong Kong. Before joining the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University as a Research Assistant Professor, Dr Wong has worked in the University of Hong Kong as an Assistant Lecturer. She has been a researcher, lecturer, clinical educator and clinician who specialises in neurogenic communication disorders for more than a decade. With a strong clinical background in serving people with neurogenic communication disorders, her research interests cover both theoretical and clinical aspects of acquired neurogenic communication disorders, including the relation between cognition and multi-level language processing, and their interplay in the course of treatment. She is also interested in studying different language treatment protocols, and inter-professional collaboration in long-term care of individuals with stroke or dementia. Her recent research work focuses on the use of technology to enhance treatment outcomes of aphasia treatment.

Dr YAO Yuan

Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies

Research Assistant Professor

Dr Yao Yuan holds a PhD in Educational Leadership and Policy from Niagara University. Before joining The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, he was an associate professor in the College of Foreign Languages at Huaihua University. His research interests include language education, educational/psychological measurement, and research methodology. In recent years, he centred on psychological and emotional responses of second language (L2) learners within different frameworks, such as language mindsets and L2 Motivational Self System. Over the past two years, he has published eight papers as the first or corresponding author in SSCI journals, including Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, System, Assessing Writing, Reading and Writing, IRAL-International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, and Early Education and Development. Currently, he is working on L2 Chinese learning in multilingual and multicultural contexts.

Dr ZHAI Mingjun

Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies

Research Assistant Professor

Dr Zhai Mingjun is a research assistant professor in the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies. Dr Zhai was trained in Cognitive Neuroscience at Rice University. Her core area of research is in understanding cognitive and neural representations underlying our ability to process words and concepts, with a particular emphasis on understanding the different levels of representation involved, how they interact, and how the representational structure changes with language experience and in different contexts. Her approach to these questions largely relies on connecting behavioural and brain measures of similarity between stimuli and the similarity structure generated from well-established computational theories of how information is coded at different levels of representations. She is also involved in ongoing projects examining: a) the impact of cross-linguistic differences on conceptual processing; b) language processing and learning in social interaction. Her works have been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Scientific Reports, and Cognitive Science.

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