iRead Foundation Makes Donation to PolyU to Support Yuen Ren Chao Prize in Language Sciences and to Advance Scientific Research in the Field

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) has received generous funding from the Shenzhen iRead Foundation (iRead Foundation) to support the Yuen Ren Chao Prize in Language Sciences (the Chao Prize) and to advance the development of language sciences.  Following the donation, PolyU and iRead Foundation will also explore opportunities to foster their academic and public engagement collaborations. Launched by the PolyU Faculty of Humanities last year, the Chao Prize comprises two awards, namely the Lifetime Achievement Award and Early Career Contribution Award. The awards are presented biennially, starting from 2024, to senior and junior scholars who have made distinguished contributions to research and education in language sciences. iRead Foundation is committed to enhancing the development of the reading ability and quality in children. Recognising the aspiration of and the social value brought about by the Chao Prize, the Foundation has made a donation of US$800,000 to fund the cash prizes given to the Prize recipients for five consecutive prize cycles starting from the inaugural one in 2024. With this generous support, the Lifetime Achievement Award recipients will be awarded US$100,000, while the Early Career Contribution Award recipients will be awarded US$50,000. Ms Li Wen, iRead Foundation Founder and Executive Board Chair, hopes to advance scientific research on children’s reading and language development through the donation. She said, “Language is a significant tool for children to communicate and acquire knowledge. We believe the development of language sciences is crucial to the enhancement of children’s reading and writing. Through language research, we are able to gain a deeper understanding of how language development impacts children’s mental and physical growth, as well as their learning patterns. With this understanding, we can develop better reading resources for children and help them develop positive lifelong reading habit.” Prof. Li Ping, Dean of the PolyU Faculty of Humanities, sincerely thanked iRead Foundation for their generous donation which enables the University to increase the amounts awarded while also adding visibility to the Prize. He said, “PolyU truly appreciates the efforts of the Foundation to promote children’s reading and language abilities. We look forward to collaborating with them in fostering research and exchanges in the fields of language studies and reading development.” Through the Chao Prize, the Faculty is poised to bring together renowned scholars in the field of language sciences around the world, making itself a hub of language sciences research. The awardees of the inaugural Yuen Ren Chao Prize in Language Sciences have been announced and the Prize Presentation Ceremony, hosted by the PolyU Faculty of Humanities, will be held this month. For more information, please visit https://www.polyu.edu.hk/fh/chao-prize/.

DALS Gradute Won Best Journal Article Award from the Hong Kong Association for Applied Linguistics for a Paper Co-authored with Prof. Hu Guangwei

Dr Xuejun Ye, a graduate of our Doctor of Applied Language Sciences (DALS) programme, won the Best Journal Article Award from the Hong Kong Association for Applied Linguistics (HAAL). The award-winning article, entitled “Teachers’ stated beliefs and practices regarding L2 motivational strategies: A mixed-methods study of misalignment and contributing factors”, was co-authored with our Associate Dean Prof. Hu Guangwei and published in System, one of the top-tier journals in applied linguistics. The paper is based on Dr Ye’s DALS thesis and reports a study on the misalignments between secondary school English language teachers’ stated beliefs about language learning motivation strategies and their reported practices in the classroom, as well as factors contributing to such misalignments. The HAAL award presentation ceremony will be held on 16 May 2024. Click HERE to read the full journal article.

PolyU Confers University Fellowship on Mr Benedict Sin Nga-yan, Governor of Sin Wai Kin Foundation Limited

The University has conferred the title of University Fellow on Mr Benedict Sin Nga-yan together with two other outstanding individuals in recognition of their significant contributions to the University and community on 26 April 2024. Mr Sin has been a Court Member of PolyU since 2019, providing valuable advice and support for university development. As the Governor of Sin Wai Kin Foundation Limited, a charitable foundation founded by his late father Dr Sin Wai Kin, Mr Sin has been instrumental in fostering the establishment of the Endowed Professorship in Humanities and Technology in 2022, enabling PolyU scholars to explore and advance cutting-edge research for the betterment of mankind. The Foundation has generously supported PolyU’s education and research initiatives, including setting up the Sin Wai Kin Chinese Humanities Development Fund to promote the learning and research of Chinese culture, language, history and philosophy and funding for humanities and rehabilitation sciences research projects. Click HERE for details.

Six FH Nominees Awarded the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship 2024/25

Six FH nominees were offered the highly competitive Hong Kong PhD Fellowship to pursue PhD study at our departments, four at CBS and one each at CHC and ENGL. The Fellowship Scheme was established in 2009 by the Research Grants Council to support the best and brightest students around the world to pursue their PHD studies in Hong Kong universities. For further details about the Scheme, please visit https://www.ugc.edu.hk/eng/rgc/funding_opport/hkpfs/. More about FH research areas https://www.polyu.edu.hk/fh/research/fh-researchers/.

Call for Nominations: Outstanding Alumni Award of PolyU Faculty of Humanities 2024

We are pleased to announce that the Faculty of Humanities(FH) is now calling for nominations for the Outstanding Alumni Award of PolyU Faculty of Humanities 2024. The award aims to give public recognition to FH graduates for their diverse accomplishments and contributions. Award Categories There are four award categories: Professional Achievement Entrepreneurial Achievement Scholarly Achievement Community Service Achievement Candidates who are aged under 40 by the end of the award year (i.e., 31 December 2024) can be considered for the Outstanding Young Alumni Award. Faculty awardees of the current year may be nominated for the Outstanding Alumni Award at the University level. Eligibility The nominated candidate must be a graduate of the Faculty of Humanities* who has successfully completed a full-time or part-time programme offered by PolyU (or its forerunners: Hong Kong Government Trade School, Hong Kong Technical College, and Hong Kong Polytechnic) which led to academic award accredited by the respective Institution. The Outstanding PolyU Alumni Award has three levels, namely Department, Faculty and University levels. The nominees for the Faculty Award should be recipients of the Departmental Alumni Award or graduates of the Faculty level programmes, such as Doctor of Applied Language Sciences and BA(Hons) in Language Studies for the Professions. The proposer can be PolyU graduates, Honorary Graduates, University Fellows, PolyU staff, current PolyU Council and Court members and current Advisory Committee members. There is no limit to the number of nominations to be submitted by each proposer. However, the proposer cannot be the candidate himself/ herself or a direct relative of the candidate. *including graduates from the former Faculty of Communication Nomination Deadline 13 May 2024 Award Details and Nomination Form Completed forms shall be sent to fh.events@polyu.edu.hk by the nomination deadline. Contact Us Email: fh.events@polyu.edu.hk Tel.: +852 3400 8212

CBS MATI Student and Lecturer Win Prizes at National English Reading and Writing Competitions

Our CBS MATI student, Mr Zhou Zhihao, won First Prize in the 2023 "Bilingual Chinese Stories" English Writing Competition (Group A) and Third Prize in the BETT National College Student English Reading Competition (Finals) . Our Lecturer, Dr Li Wenjing, who served as the instructor for Zhihao, has also been recognised with the “Excellent Instructor” award. Both the "Bilingual Chinese Stories" and the BETT series cover a number of national competitions for college students, including English reading, writing, as well as application and translation of foreign languages.

First Yuen Ren Chao Prize in Language Sciences Announced

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) Faculty of Humanities is pleased to announce the laureates of the first Yuen Ren Chao Prize in Language Sciences. The Prize is initiated and hosted by the Faculty of Humanities to recognise distinguished contributions to language science research. The Lifetime Achievement Award is awarded in to two esteemed scholars, Prof. Peter Hagoort and Prof. William Shiyuan Wang (in alphabetical order of last name). Their research findings have led to major breakthroughs and have far-reaching impacts in the field around the globe, owning them the reputation as pioneering and inspiring leaders in language sciences.   Prof. Peter Hagoort is Director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (since November 2006), and the Founding Director of the Donders Institute Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging (DCCN, 1999). In addition, he is a Professor in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Radboud University Nijmegen. His own research interests relate to the domain of the human language faculty and how it is instantiated in the brain. In his research, he applies neuroimaging techniques such as ERP, MEG, PET and fMRI to investigate the language system and its impairments as in aphasia, dyslexia and autism. Prof. Hagoort is a recipient of the Spinoza Prize and the Heymans Prize.  He is an elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Academia Europaea, and the US National Academy of Sciences. Prof. Hagoort was the first to identify and characterise the P600 (note: a measurable response in the brain) as a marker of syntactic processing (Hagoort & Brown, Language and Cognitive Processes, 1993). Using multimodal methods (EEG, fMRI), he demonstrated that world knowledge is immediately integrated into sentence comprehension, challenging the standard assumption that sentence meaning is first determined and then its truth value is assessed (Hagoort et al., Science, 2004). Most recently, he found that catecholamine-related neurotransmitters can influence language processing (Tan & Hagoort, Cerebral Cortex, 2020) – this is the first study to show a neuropharmacological effect on semantic processing during sentence comprehension. He has also led the field in theorising about the neurobiology of language and developing testable models. He developed influential theories aimed at solving the difficult binding problem for language, proposing that the left inferior gyrus plays a critical role in unification (Hagoort, TICS, 2005) and demonstrating that this unification process and neurobiological models of language processing must move beyond the classical Wernicke-Lichtheim-Geschwind model (Hagoort, Frontiers in Psychology, 2013; Hagoort, Science, 2019). His MUC (memory, unification, and control) model has been highly influential. He has also moved the field forward by urging researchers to investigate the operation of language “in its full glory” such as co-speech gestures, conversational interactions. Prof. Hagoort receives the Yuen Ren Chao Prize in Language Sciences for his distinguished contributions to the interdisciplinary studies in cognitive neuroscience and the understanding of human language processing in the brain. Prof. William Shiyuan Wang was born and grew up in China. He received his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Michigan. He served as a Professor of Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley for more than 30 years, where he supervised over 30 PhD dissertations. He was the first to initiate a course on the biological foundation of language. He was also the first to use computers to compile a large database to study the historical development of Chinese dialects. He founded the Journal of Chinese Linguistics in 1973 and served as its Editor-in-Chief until 2018. He was elected President of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics when it was founded in 1992 in Singapore. He has served as a visiting professor in India, Italy, Japan, and Sweden. After relocation to Hong Kong, he taught as Chair Professor of Language Engineering at the City University of Hong Kong, and as Research Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has served as member of several panels at the Hong Kong Research Grants Council. He is now Chair Professor of Language and Cognitive Sciences in the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Professor Emeritus of the University of California at Berkeley, and Academician of Academia Sinica.   Prof. Wang’s early interest in evolutionary theory, both biological and cultural, provided the basis of a theory of lexical diffusion, according to which variants of a language compete at different levels, and surviving variants persist into future generations. Recently, his interests have extended to the cognitive neuroscience of language across the lifespan, especially ageing. His honours include awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, resident fellowships for advanced studies at Stanford, Bellagio (Italy), Kyoto; Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America; Lifetime Achievement Award from the Shanghai Anthropological Society, Honorary Professor of Peking University, among others, Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from the University of Chicago, and Honorary Degree of Doctor of Humanities honoris causa from University of Macau. Prof. Wang receives the Yuen Ren Chao Prize in Language Sciences for his distinguished contributions to the interdisciplinary studies in Chinese linguistics, evolutionary linguistics, and the cognitive neuroscience of language and ageing. We would like to express our deepest congratulations to both Prof. Hagoort and Prof. Wang for their exceptional contributions to the field of language sciences. Their work has significantly advanced the development of language sciences. Both Laureates will deliver a public lecture on 10 May 2024. Interested parties are invited to join the lectures through the registration links below. Participants of 2024 International Symposium of Language Sciences (ISLS) need not register again. Click here to register for Prof. Peter Hagoort’s lecture Click here to register for Prof. William Shiyuan Wang’s lecture There were no suitable candidates who have met the high standard for the Early Career Contribution Award this year. Nonetheless, we encourage young researchers to continue their hard work and we look forward to recognising their significant contributions in the future. Faculty of Humanities, PolyU April 2024

ENGL Received EDB Funding to Run a Gifted Education Programme on English Language and Digital Literacies in 2023/24

Our Department of English and Communication is set to unveil a gifted education programme, "Cultivating English Language and Digital Literacies for Future Leaders". This programme is funded by the Gifted Education Fund of the Education Bureau (EDB) of the HKSAR Government. This year-long programme is meticulously designed to enhance the knowledge and skills of gifted secondary school students in Secondary 4 and 5 (2023/24 school year) in three key areas: academic, digital, and professional workplace literacies. The programme is led by Dr Christy Qiu and Dr Jenifer Ho from the Department. The Academic Literacies course will provide students with the tools to excel in academic writing and reading and effective communication. The Digital Literacies course will equip students with the skills to navigate the digital world, including interpreting and creating digital content. The Workplace Literacies course will prepare students for the professional world, focusing on business communication and presentation skills. To consolidate their knowledge, students will undertake a research project under the mentorship of an academic. This project will not only allow students to apply what they have learned but also foster their creativity, independent and critical thinking skills. We will be recruiting gifted students for this transformative programme between 1 March and 19 April 2024. This is a unique opportunity for secondary schools in Hong Kong to empower their students and prepare them for a future where English language and digital literacy skills are paramount. Stay tuned for more information on our ENGL website and social media.

PolyU Research Reveals Significant Effects of Instructors Onscreen During Video Classes in Aiding Student Learning

Online learning has become “the new normal” of education since COVID-19 severely disrupted face-to-face teaching activities. Researchers from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) have conducted a study to analyse whether and how the instructor’s presence in online video lectures affected student learning and learning outcomes. The results reveal that students are more motivated to perform socio-emotional and cognitive processing when an instructor, human or animated, is present onscreen, hence facilitating more effective learning. The study findings have been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Previous studies have indicated that socio-emotional cues, such as human facial expressions and gestures, help students understand and stay focused on learning content. Led by Prof. Ping LI, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Sin Wai Kin Foundation Professor in Humanities and Technology at PolyU, the research team studied how learners respond to virtual learning with different types and levels of interaction by examining multimodal data of students’ learning performance, brain activity and eye movement, as well as the correlation between these measurements. Eighty-one PolyU students participated in the experiment where some of them watched video lectures with a human instructor accompanying the lecture slides, some watched the same video lectures with an animated instructor, and still some watched the lectures with no onscreen instructor and only the lecture slides. This was followed by a set of assessments of how effectively they had learned. Compared with the no-instructor group, students with an onscreen instructor performed significantly better in the post-course assessments, while the exact embodiment of the instructor—real vs animated—did not affect the overall scores. The results provide strong and important evidence that the instructor’s image, human or animated, improves educational outcomes in the virtual setting. The researchers examined the impact of instructor’s image on learning through a combination of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and eye-movement tracking of the students as they watched the lectures. While students with an instructor performed better, the eye-tracking results, surprisingly, showed that the human instructor may actually distract the students from the slides, as more time was spent by students looking at the slides when the instructor was absent or was an animation. A deeper analysis of the eye-tracking data resolved this contradiction. Crucially, the correlation of eye movements—the extent to which the students shifted their gaze in unison—was higher in instructor-present groups than in the no-instructor group, and better-performing students also displayed more correlated eye movements than the lower performers. This suggests that although an instructor’s image may distract students from the slides, it is also more likely in guiding them to pay attention to the appropriate parts of the onscreen content. In other words, students with an instructor tend to focus on the same places, while those without an instructor are more random in their focus. The fMRI results, which identified the specific brain regions students used most, aligned with the eye-tracking data. Just as their eye movements were synchronised, so did the students with an instructor show greater synchrony in the activity of brain regions crucial for learning, including regions involved in working memory and mentalising. This alignment can be attributed to the higher level of cognitive and socio-emotional processing motivated by the onscreen instructor that served as a social cue. Under this condition, learners follow the visual content in the video more closely, allocate attention more proactively and ultimately learn better. As the data suggest that an onscreen instructor’s image entails both socio-emotional benefits and attentional distraction unrelated to learning, the researchers further propose a trade-off hypothesis suggesting learning outcome depends on whether the benefits can outweigh the costs brought by the distraction. While the trade-off also relies on a learner’s ability to leverage socio-emotional processing and attention control for learning, it explains the individual difference in student learning under the same virtual setting. Prof. Li remarked, “Although the pandemic has subsided, online learning through the use of multimedia instructional videos continues to shape education. Our findings suggest that an onscreen instructor—even an animated one—can make up for some deficits of the online learning setting, where socio-emotional cues are less salient and cognitive engagement is harder to sustain. This contributes to the development of an evidence-based instructional design for multimedia learning, thereby enhancing student’s learning experience and outcome.” Prof. Li was interviewed in CRHK’s programme Education Forum broadcast on 30 March about the study. Check out the interview at: https://polyu.me/49geIK0 (00:17 - 14:15) (subscription required)

DALS Graduate Won Second Prize in Provincial Award for a Paper Co-authored with Prof. Hu Guangwei

Dr Wang Qian, a graduate of our Doctor of Applied Language Sciences programme, won Second Prize in the 2023 Philosophy and Social Science Outstanding Achievement Award of Shaanxi Province for a paper co-authored with Associate Dean Prof. Hu Guangwei. The paper, published earlier in Lingua, is entitled “What surprises, interests and confuses researchers? A frame-based analysis of knowledge emotion markers in research articles”. The Award is initiated and established by the Shaanxi Provincial People’s Government. It is awarded biennially and represents the highest honour and level of research in the field of philosophy and social sciences in Shaanxi province. With a history of over 30 years, the award categories span across monographs, papers, and consulting reports, with 318 achievements honored out of nearly 3000 submissions from across Shaanxi Province. Click HERE to read the paper.