Pedagogical Linguistics - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2021

Since Hong Kong handover, the language policy in Hong Kong shifts from diglossic bilingualism to bi-literacy and trilingualism policy, balancing the status of English and Chinese with the mother tongue education policy. This policy shift has inadvertently impacted non-Chinese speaking (NCS) students’ enrollment, whose limited mastery of Chinese language prevents them from the mainstream schooling. Faced with this ethnically diverse and multilingual population, Applied Learning Chinese (ApL(C)) motivating practical reading and writing in an applied learning context was proposed by Hong Kong Education Bureau as an alternative for second language education. This study examines the effectiveness of “Reading to Learn, Learning to Write, R2L” pedagogy (Rose, 2012) in teaching Chinese practical writing to NCS students in Hong Kong with pedagogic interventions and Systemic Functional analytical perspective. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to perceive students’ learning experiences with R2L pedagogy. The finding suggests an increased meta-linguistic awareness of genre-specific writings after interventions to be empowered with a voice against social inequity and be empathized with humanistic reflections.

This study employed a corpus analysis to describe differences in lexical bundle patterns between English for academic purposes (EAP) reading textbooks and lower-division university textbooks by focusing on three characteristics: (1) the frequency of occurrence of bundles, (2) the frequency of bundle structures (e.g., phrasal vs. clausal), and (3) the frequency of bundle discourse functions (e.g., stance, discourse organizers, and referential; see Biber et al., 2004; Biber, 2006). Results revealed that the corpus representing lower-division university textbooks employed more passive bundles, intangible framing bundles, and text deixis bundles. On the other hand, the corpus representing EAP reading textbooks contained more prepositional phrase bundles, anticipatory it bundles, and place bundles. A qualitative comparison also revealed that quantity bundles in the corpus representing lower-division university textbooks made reference to technical and academic calculations. These results show how the communicative purposes of EAP reading textbooks differ from introductory university textbooks, which can be used to inform EAP reading instruction.

Research states that when deciding what target lexical items to focus in their syllabi, textbook designers tend to use their intuition and establish their framework for vocabulary teaching accordingly rather than using a systematic method. With the advent of computational methods for language analysis, contemporary EFL publishers also claim they have begun to design corpus-informed textbooks reflecting actual language use in their products as evidenced in a representative corpus. In an attempt to offer a more rational method to form corpus-oriented and pedagogically convenient target vocabulary lists, the present study, exploiting different association measures in a representative corpus, seeks to detect the collocational strength of 50 target word combinations presented in the two EFL textbooks as an initial step. Additionally, inspired by Ellis et al.’s (2008) research, the current study aims to investigate if/to what extent the association measures indicating collocational strength correlate with EFL instructors’ intuitions regarding collocational frequency. The results indicate that EFL instructors’ collocational frequency intuitions correlate strongly with an objective collocational frequency measure (t-score). The findings are likely to guide decision makers in tertiary level schools in constructing their vocabulary syllabi and designing materials for teaching collocations in particular.

This teaching report focuses on effectiveness of teaching pedagogies of the word formation process to Navajo students at a two-year college in the American Southwest. The activities used to teach the concepts of word formation are illustrated/described. The purpose of using authentic examples including songs from popular culture is to make students aware that these linguistic concepts are related to their everyday lives and in the hope that they can utilize these concepts and integrate real-life examples in their future teaching career. A feedback form was administered to collect the students’ views toward the pedagogies including activities in an introductory Linguistics class.