“Communication Around You” Secondary School Workshop Series (October – December 2020)

Department of English has launched a “Communication Around You” Secondary School Workshop Series to allow senior secondary school students to learn how English is, in fact, closely related to our everyday lives. Around 190 S4 – S6 students joined three workshops on Zoom between October and December 2020 to see how studying linguistics can be both a science and a practical skill:

• Workshop 1: How language betrays our emotions (23 October 2020) – This workshop showed students how modern language and psychological sciences allow us to measure emotional responses to different communication strategies.
• Workshop 2: The link between your ideas, your hands, and your speech (11 November 2020) – This explained why gestures are an integral part of the communicative process and the myths related to them.
• Workshop 3: Smart living with language technology (3 December 2020) – This workshop demonstrated how linguistic knowledge is applied in the development of next-generation language technologies, such as big data analysis.