School of English

Research Bio

This project compares six Chinese translations of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989) and The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991) in relation to gender and culture, with a primary focus on the role of the translators’ gender awareness in dealing with female alienation in the source texts. Differences can be seen in the translations made by translators of different gender identities, particularly in translating women’s alienation and awakening in heterosexual relationships, women’s experiences in homosocial relationships, and marital sexual violence against women. The project explores how the translators deal with such descriptions, how the author’s feminist consciousness and thoughts on female alienation are conveyed in the translations, whether translation equivalences (including linguistic and cultural aspects) are achieved in the Chinese translations, and what roles gender and culture play in translating women’s writing.

Research Project Outline

My research is undertaken to investigate the current practices of culture teaching in undergraduate English programs within the context of China with a particular focus on the culture-based course A General Survey of English-speaking Countries. The following guiding research questions are identified based on the review of the literature on theoretical approaches to “culture” in ELT as well as the policy and pedagogical landscape on English in China: 1) How does the theoretical development on culture teaching in ELT shape education policies in China and how are such policies stated in official curricula concerning culture teaching translated into the classroom practice? 2) What are teachers’ perceptions of the teaching of culture and what are the challenges and constraints faced by them in teaching the culture-based course A General Survey of English-speaking Countries? 3) What are the patterns and variations existing in teachers’ pedagogical practices in teaching culture and how do their beliefs shape their teaching?

Interviews and observations (involving audio-recordings and transcriptions) are two main methodological tools applied to collect data in this qualitative research. Other supplementary data sources, such as online official data, participants’ teaching materials are also employed. A framework of multi-layered analysis is adopted. Through the triangulation of various methods and data sources, policy-making at the macro-level is linked to classroom practice at the micro-level and insights into how culture is being taught in English language programs are provided.

The findings suggest that: 1) though the national guidelines for undergraduate English programs has a clear intention for a strong commitment to promote students’ cultural understanding and intercultural communicative skills, the unpractical curricular policies can become potential constraints to the teaching of culture. Inadequacies in the policy provision thus result in the inefficiency of teaching; 2) Teachers are increasingly aware of the dynamic and variable nature of culture, which academia strongly suggest should be incorporated into its teaching. However, they have a biased opinion about target cultures and are predisposed to British and American cultures. In the teaching of culture, they encounter a series of challenges such as overloaded syllabus, overwhelming task of preparation, fear of lacking oversea experience and knowledge base, lack of institutional support and relevant training, students’ lack of motivation and large-sized classes. These challenges stem from two major factors: the complex nature of culture teaching and the low status of culture-based courses in language programs. 3) Teachers’ attitudes, beliefs and their cultural experience have impact on their pedagogical choices. There are shared patterns as well as variations in teachers’ pedagogical approaches. The actual classroom practices are mostly teacher-centered and involve merely knowledge impartment centered on the surface level of cultural knowledge. The cultures of Britain and the U.S. are considered to be representative of the target cultures and dominate the teaching. In addition, the integration of culture and language in the classroom practice manifests itself in different ways.

Research Bio

At the present time, I am a teacher working at the Continuing Education School, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Here I teach languages (both English and Chinese) and a number of culture-based courses to students from various age groups and country backgrounds. My educational experiences revolve also around language learning and teaching, including a BA degree in English Language and Literature at Hunan University, and a MA degree in Applied Linguistics at the University of Sheffield, UK. Currently I am a part-time doctoral student at the University of Nottingham, Ningbo, working on a research project concerning the teaching of culture in language classroom.

Research Project Outline

Skilled reading is a remarkable human achievement. From a psycholinguistic perspective, it entails a mastery of multiple levels of analysis, including orthography, syntax and semantics. In such a complex process, exactly when visual input is recognised as words and comprehended, and to what extent this is automatic, are two of the most debated issues in language science. My thesis aims to contribute to these debates by investigating single-character words in Chinese. Through a series of six neurolinguistic experiments, my thesis has demonstrated that Chinese single-character words can be processed early and automatically. The project adds novel support for the parallel models in linguistic information processing and provides constraints which affect such early automaticity.

Research Bio

My research interests include psycholinguistics, bilingualism and corpus linguistics. My research project aims to uncover the temporal order of processing different levels of linguistic structure and to demonstrate early neural dynamics of linguistic information.

Research Bio

In my doctoral project I aim to explore students’ and teachers’ perceptions of good English teachers in Kazakhstan and investigate how socio-cultural roots of participants’ values influence their expectations of good English teachers. This study is an attempt to broaden a common methodological base and employs multiplicity of counter-instruments.

Research Project Outline

Pragmatic markers are elements of language which have been employed to encode the speaker’s intention and interpersonal meaning (Carter and McCarthy, 2006). The existing literature seem to suggest that Chinese pragmatic markers have not been fully analyzed and described in terms of functions in Chinese workplace contexts. Based on the theory on pragmatic markers in Carter and McCarthy (2006) and Feng (2010), this study will provide a comprehensive description for some selected Chinese Pragmatic markers usage in workplace contexts in terms of collocation, colligation and semantic prosody. In addition, this study will also explore how these Pragmatic markers are employed to realize the speakers’ communicative purpose (e.g. realize leadership) and the relationship between those pragmatic usage and their users’ ethnographical features.

Research Bio

I finished my undergraduate and postgraduate study respectively in English with International Business and Communication and International Entrepreneurship at the University of Nottingham Ningbo ChinaBrief bio. Before I started my PhD study, I have worked as the Research Assistant Fellow in School of English, UNNC.

Research Project Outline

 

I adopt a mixed-methods approach to identify formulaic sequences in a representatively large corpus of learner data acquired in naturalistic academic settings, and a control corpus of native speakers’ academic spoken English, and to investigate their production patterns. The primary focus of my study is to validate the hypothesis that formulaic language is holistically stored in and retrieved from the mental lexicon, and thus it should present phonological coherence, that is, the production of formulaic sequences should be free from internal pauses.

Research Bio

 

My research interests are in the areas of learner corpus research, corpus linguistics, applied linguistics, English for academic purposes, and children's language development. 

Research Project Outline

My research focuses on developing multi-modal corpus approaches to gesture, explanation in collaborative discourse, and conceptualization. Drawing on a background that includes philosophy and education, I’m attempting to understand patterns in the depictive gestures that students perform when explaining complex and abstract content. The form and function of depictive gestures can be understood as physical conceptualizations that together with spoken descriptions construct concepts “in the flesh”. Along with my PhD studies, I’m currently working in collaboration to develop the multi-modal component of the University of Nottingham Corpus of Academic Written and Spoken English (CAWSE).

Research Bio

Graduated with a B.A. in Philosophy from Florida Atlantic University. After a few years teaching Philosophy in Colombia, South America, came to UNNC for the MA in Applied Linguistics. I subsequently moved on into the PhD program at UNNC in the School of English.

 

Research Project Outline

My research project is about the socio-intercultural experiences of local and international students in a Sino-foreign university in China. The project is currently under the supervision of Dr. Candace Veecock and Prof. Lixian Jin and I am in my second year. I am aiming at enhancing my understanding of the socio-intercultural life of students on this campus from a sociolinguistic perspective. So the research questions centre around (a) students’ attitudes towards their socio-intercultural experiences and the meaning of these experiences to them (b) what interactional factors influence such experiences and how the underlying socio-cultural values embedded in those interactions are reflected (c) what are the linguistic strategies students adopt when engaging with each other in socio-intercultural encounters outside the classroom and why.

Research Project Outline

My research interests are: second language learning in later life stages and the possible impacts of learning a new language on health, wellbeing and cognitive function.

According to OECD (2013), the percentage of people who are over 65 years old will rise to around 27% in 2050. The problems of ageing populations are a global issue, exacerbated in China by several factors, including the huge size of the population. While the increasingly multilingual nature of our global society has stimulated much research activity into second language learning in the cognitive neuroscience domain in recent decades, research into bilingualism in the elderly is still scarce compared to that of younger learners.

Therefore, the aims of my PhD thesis are: 1) To explore the degree of brain plasticity for language learning in older learners by teaching them to understand and speak a second language (English) and measuring their electro-physiological brains patterns before and after this learning experience, using the Even-related Potential (ERP) technique. 2) To shed light on other possible impacts of the experience of learning a language later in life in terms of psychological well-being and other cognitive and affective factors.

My research questions are:

RQ1. Is there evidence of brain plasticity due to language learning in people over 60, reflected in the electro-physiological responses to syntactic and semantic anomalies in the second language?

RQ2. Are there any other psycho/socio/emotive benefits to learning a second language later in life?

Research Bio

I finished my first degree in English with International Business at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China, and obtained my Master degree in Education from the University of Edinburgh. I then spent some months at UNNC as a Research Assistant, firstly in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Laboratory and then as an administrative assistant in the School of English. I am now a full-time PhD student in School of English. I have very much enjoyed this experience as an undergraduate student, a member of staff and now a researcher, which has allowed me to see how our school has grown and developed over these years.

Research Project Outline

My study aims at investigating lexis in an introductory book of logistics by comparing this specialized corpus (179,941 tokens) with a general academic corpus (198,598 tokens), namely, the section J extracted from Flob. The comparison of the two corpora is to answer the following questions.

1. How large a vocabulary is needed for logistics majors to deal with most of the vocabulary in a logistics textbook?

2. Does the practice of providing an EAP course and letting the students work through a series of unrelated texts impose too much vocabulary burden on them?

3. What are values of an EAP course for students majoring in logistics?

4. When should students move from EAP to ESP? In other words, when could be appropriate time for logistics majors to start logistic content-based English education?

5. How important is the logistics-related vocabulary in a discipline specific text?

6. What should ESP teachers do about technical vocabulary?