How To Help Hong Kong Students Discover English?

Workshop Series 2020/2021

Background

Following the success from 2017 onwards, the workshop series in 2021 took a great leap forward and attracted a substantial number of participants. This year, the series entitled ”How to Help Hong Kong Students Discover English?” attracted more than 600 English teachers, student teachers, and education practitioners from Hong Kong, mainland China and internationally, who learned about the Corpus-based Language Pedagogy (CBLP).

Details

Despite the challenges we faced during the pandemic in the academic year 2020/21, our aspiration to provide innovative ideas about corpus-based learning and teaching continued and turned into a successful outcome. From 26^th January 2021 to 10^th March 2021 in the Spring Semester, we organised altogether six workshops online via Zoom meeting, including:

1. Using Learner’s Corpora for Pronunciation Teaching and Learning
2. Using Corpora in Grammar Teaching and Learning
3. English-Chinese Parallel Corpus for Language Studies
4. Using Corpora to Improve Academic Writing for Senior Secondary and University Students
5. Using Corpus Keywords in Teaching Reading
6. Using Corpora to Analyse Teaching Materials and Improve Teaching Design.

Acknowledgment

We were grateful to have invited six guest speakers including Prof. He Anping and Dr. Chen Xiao, Sylvia from South China Normal University, Dr. Chen Hsueh-Chu, Rebecca, Dr. Lee Fung King, Jackie, Dr. Wang Lixun from the Education University of Hong Kong, and Dr. Chen Meilin from the Hong Kong Baptist University. The workshop series ran smoothly and achieved a great success, receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback from our participants. They also learned a lot about the advantages of using corpus resources in language teaching and how they can overcome some limitations of using corpora. Here are some of their invaluable comments and feedback which become the greatest motivation for us:

Corpora offer authentic texts, we can get a lot of actual data to help students better understand the tough points in language.

Corpus resources have their efficiency. They consist vivid indicators of language.

You can get precious materials from corpora which you cannot get otherwise.

To overcome limitations, I may cooperate with other colleagues and also with the students to build small-scale corpus and database.

By reading books and attending workshops alike definitely help me understand teachers’ qualification in corpus literacy is important.