Knowledge Transfer Workshops Series – How to help Hong Kong Students Discover English
- 2018
- Research
- Department of Linguistics and Modern Language Studies
The Department of Linguistics and Modern Language Studies (LML) offered a series of Knowledge Transfer (KT) workshops entitled ‘How to Help Hong Kong Students Discover English’ from October to December 2017. In recent decades, how to help students learn and use real language patterns has posed a big challenge for English teachers. Traditional tools (e.g. textbooks, dictionaries, other published materials, etc.) and teachers’ intuition, are unable to fully address this issue. This is an area where corpus linguistics can fill the gap. Using corpus data allows students and teachers to study naturally occurring English language for grammatical patterns, word usage and textual discourse. In addition, corpus-based teaching allows teachers to develop their hands-on activities that cater for students at different levels. Students can also use corpora to explore authentic language data and answer their own queries about the English language, as well as to become more independent language learners.
Dr Angel Ma started this series of workshops by her talk on ‘FUN with Words: Experiencing Corpus-based Vocabulary Teaching and Learning’ on 13 October 2017. Word knowledge and usage are more accessible through corpora than other traditional tools, such as dictionaries. This workshop introduced some free online corpora to school teachers and provided guidance on how to explore corpus data and discover authentic use of vocabulary/collocations. Corpus-based vocabulary teaching materials/activities for both primary and secondary teachers were showcased. The design principles were also unveiled.
There were three more workshops conducted by Dr Wang Lixun, Dr Rebecca Chen and Dr Lee Fung King Jackie in November and December 2017.
LML offered four KT workshops from October to December 2017.
Dr Angel Ma started this series of workshops by her talk on ‘FUN with Words: Experiencing Corpus-based Vocabulary Teaching and Learning’ on 13 October 2017.
