Welcome to the Department of Linguistics and Modern Language Studies (LML).
We use language every day of our lives and yet we rarely stop to examine what it is and how it shapes the way we live. It carries our thinking, our relationships, our histories, and a great deal of what we mean when we speak of who we are. Looking at it closely is not an abstract exercise. It changes how teachers teach, how children learn to read, how a translator carries meaning across boundaries and cultures, and how a city in which several languages circulate every day comes to understand itself.
Language is not simply something to be decoded. What a person means depends on the words they chose from a range of options, on what they could assume others already know, and on the cultural norms they share. Studying that, and teaching people to work with it, is what we do here. Language is living and constantly changing. Technologies such as generative AI have also changed how people write, translate, and learn a language, and we are at the front of the research on what those changes mean for learners, teachers, and classrooms.
LML was founded in 2012, following the restructuring of the former Faculty of Languages into the Faculty of Humanities (FHM). Over the past decade it has grown into a department committed to excellence in teaching, curriculum development, academic research, knowledge transfer, and student training.
In our department, research and teaching are necessarily interrelated. What we discover about how languages are acquired, about what learners actually do when they write and speak, and about how technology is changing both, feeds into what our students encounter in our classrooms. What happens in those classrooms shapes the questions we go on to ask.
We offer a wide range of linguistics courses that give strong subject knowledge to students in Education and Education-plus programmes at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. We teach French, Japanese, and Korean, and we have developed Minor Programmes in French Studies, Japanese Studies, Korean Language Studies, English Language, and Translation. Our Master of Arts in Intercultural Communication and Translation, which becomes the Master of Arts in Digital Linguistics and Intercultural Communication from 2027/28, carries this work into professional settings.
Our research covers language acquisition, cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, computer-assisted language learning, language technology and digital humanities, phonetics and phonology, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, language and gender, language assessment, multilingualism, Chinese linguistics, Cantonese studies, language teacher education, learner agency and autonomy, and translation and interpreting studies. We have a track record of attaining grants from the Research Grants Council and publishing in leading international journals and with major academic publishers. We also serve as editors of international journals and book series.
Our work reaches beyond the University. The clearest example is in corpus linguistics: the Corpus-Aided Platform for Language Teachers, led by Prof Angel Ma and colleagues, is an award-winning site that has put corpus tools and corpus-based materials into the hands of school teachers in Hong Kong, the Mainland, and elsewhere, and it continues to run workshops and competitions each year. We have also built a digital museum documenting six decades of change in Cantonese, developed acoustic training for speech therapists working with children who have speech sound disorders, produced grammar and gender-aware teaching materials for schools, and worked alongside our own student teachers in real primary classrooms.
We are actively looking for research postgraduate students, and we would encourage you to approach us. We supervise across the areas set out above, and we are particularly keen to hear from those working on language learning and technology, corpus linguistics, language teacher education, phonetics and phonology, Cantonese and Chinese linguistics, discourse analysis, multilingualism, and translation. Outstanding candidates should consider the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme, for which we are glad to offer support and guidance. A research degree here is an apprenticeship as much as a qualification, and our students are part of the department's intellectual life rather than adjacent to it. If your interests sit close to ours, write to us and tell us what you want to work on.
What we do here has been built by many hands over more than a decade, and it continues to grow. Please explore our webpage to learn more about us. If anything is of interest to you, I hope you will look further and get in touch. For any enquiries, please contact us at lml@eduhk.hk.
Glenn STOCKWELL
Acting Head of LML