The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) is dedicated to advancing academic excellence and fostering high-impact research to address evolving societal needs. Prof. Renia LOPEZ, Assistant Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Associate Professor of the Department of English and Communication, has been awarded the Research Grants Council’s (RGC) Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious Fellowship Scheme (HSSPFS). This fellowship recognises her outstanding academic contributions and will support her cutting-edge project, titled “The Impact of Video-Mediated Communication on Multimodal Disfluency and Interactional Management in Second Language English Speakers”, with funding of HK$602,600 for 12 months.
This project investigates how video-mediated interaction (VMI) affects the interactional competence of second-language (L2) speakers. The study examines a longitudinal corpus of 40 Cantonese L2 English speakers completing matched monologic and dialogic tasks in both face-to-face and VMI environments. Using a mixed-methods analysis that combines systematic multimodal annotation, statistical modelling, and multimodal conversation analysis, the study will test how the online medium reshapes the cognitive-interactional foundations of L2 communication.
Deeper insights from the research could inform the design of more effective and supportive communication systems, with potential applications across professional domains such as health communications, customer service and language education. Furthermore, this understanding could enhance human-machine interaction, particularly as systems are increasingly trained to recognise and respond to the multimodal signals characteristic of human conversational fluency and disfluency.
Introduced in 2012/13, the HSSPFS grants extended time off and support funding to outstanding investigators in the Humanities and Social Sciences Panel, enabling them to focus on research and writing.
