Updates from Department of English Language Education

In the age of change and transformation, the Department of English Language Education (ELE) has been continuously building up its strength in teaching, research and community engagement and setting up a bridge between the past, present and future. ELE members have acquired research and teaching expertise in various areas, including language teacher education, e-learning, second language acquisition, language policy and sociolinguistics. ELE aspires to nurture graduates with a global outlook and multicultural awareness. The Department’s research outputs have appeared in the most respected international academic journals, such as Applied Linguistics and TESOL Quarterly. ELE’s multi-disciplinary research on language teaching and learning, as well as language practices and ideologies in schools and other social contexts set a solid foundation for classroom teaching in the Faculty’s undergraduate and postgraduate programmes.

ELE members actively play a service role in the wider community. Colleagues contribute to the local educational community by carrying out numerous workshops and other school-based activities. The 1st and 2nd ELE e-learning Roundtables were held in 2018 and 2019 with over 100 participants each year and proved to be a fruitful platform for facilitating local English teachers’ professional development; we aim to run the Roundtable as an annual event. The Department held an inaugural conference on Language Teaching and Learning: Cognition and Identity, on 28 and 29 June 2019. The conference explored various aspects of language teaching and learning and how they relate to the overall cultural and social discourses, in the era of neoliberalism and globalisation. ELE is also redesigning the Public Lecture Series to be of general interest to a larger audience and to strengthen the university-school-family connection.

In the coming two to three years, ELE continuously provides high-quality teaching for both pre- and in-service English teachers, and is on its way to becoming a regionally leading player in research on teacher education and e-learning, as well as the multiple driving forces that construct language-in-education policies and practices.