Language Teaching and Learning | Department of English and Communication

This research area covers all aspects of language teaching and learning, including the teaching and learning of English and other languages, second language acquisition, needs analysis, programme evaluation, language policy, language in education, change management, teacher learning and professional development, multimodal features involved in teaching and learning, pronunciation, learner language corpora, corpus-driven studies of pedagogical grammar, classroom discourse, language across the curriculum, academic literacy, genre based pedagogy, pedagogy and curriculum development and English for academic purposes (EAP).

(1) English as a lingua franca

Dr Anne Schluter

(The socio-political role of English)

Click HERE to check new and on-going research projects.

(2) English for Specific Purposes

Prof. Eric Friginal*

(Call Centre Assessment, Aeronautical Communication)

Prof. Guangwei Hu*

(Teaching/learning of ESP/EAP)

Click HERE to check new and on-going research projects.

(3) Second Language Acquisition

Prof. Guangwei Hu*

(Language-in-education policy, Intercultural Pragmatics)

Dr William Feng*

(Textbook analysis, Classroom analysis)

Dr Phoebe Lin

(Computer-assisted language learning, Vocabulary acquisition)

Dr Renia Lopez

(The pragmatic meaning of gestures)

Dr Christy Qiu

(Second language teaching and learning)

Dr John Rogers

(Second language instruction, spacing and practice effects)

Click HERE to check new and on-going research projects.

(4) Second Language Writing

Prof. Eric Friginal*

(L1 and L2 discursive features, L2 writing assessment)

Prof. Guangwei Hu*

Click HERE to check new and on-going research projects.

*All faculty members with a star next to their name are potential Principal Supervisors for the 2023-24 intake of RPg students.

Research Highlights

Author	Title	Year	Research Type
Feng, D.	Infusing moral education into English language teaching: an ontogenetic analysis of social values in EFL textbooks in Hong Kong. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 40:4, 458-473.	2019	Journal Article
Hu, G.	Culture and peer feedback. In K. Hyland & F. Hyland (Eds.), Feedback in second language writing: Contexts and issues (2nd ed.; pp. 45-63). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.	2019	Book Chapter
Lopez-Ozieblo, R.	Cut-offs and co-occurring gestures: Similarities between speakers’ first and second languages. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching. https://doi.org/10.1515/iral-2017-0117	2019	Journal Article
Stell, G.	Indigenization in a downgraded continuum: Ideologies behind phonetic variation in Namibian Afrikaans. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2021(269), 227-252. https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2020-2109	2021	Journal Article