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Research Postgraduate Studies (MPhil & PhD)

  • Postgraduate study by research in our Department is available in the following major research areas (in alphabetic order):
    • Bilingual communication and bilingual education
    • Chinese and Education: Acquisition, Assessment and CSL;
    • Language and Technology;
    • Linguistics of Chinese and other East Asian Languages; and
    • Translation and Interpreting Studies

    For applicants for the area in "Bilingual Communication and Bilingual Education", those with at least three years' working experience in corporate communication and/or related professional areas will have an advantage.

    To be admitted to the research postgraduate program, applicants must satisfy the entrance requirements. For the details of the requirements and further information, please check the E-prospectus and visit the website of Research Office.

    E-prospectus for Research Postgraduate Studies

    Research Office

    Applicants should demonstrate in their application materials adequate knowledge and understanding of the subject matter. Prospective students are very strongly urged to send a copy of a major research paper (a term paper, research report, or thesis), which should demonstrate an applicant's ability to pursue serious scholarly inquiry. Applicants will also need to send a CV which clearly shows all academic and professional qualifications and work experience, if any.

    Applications can be considered at any time of year.

    International Postgraduate Scholarships for PhD Studies

    CBS invites applications from international students who are interested at pursuing PhD studies at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University International Postgraduate Scholarships for PhD Studies will be awarded through open competition to academically strong applicants who can contribute to the internationalization of PolyU and bring cultural diversity to the University. A PhD applicant must contact an academic staff member (proposed Chief Supervisor) to jointly come up with a proposal. For the details, please visit the website of Research Office.

    Topics of Recent Dissertations


    PhD Dissertations
    • Linguistic Characterization of Three Written Chinese Registers
    • A comparison of "old-style" and "new-style" of the general Hakka accent as spoken by the "indigenous inhabitants" of Hong Kong
    • The Influence of Siddham Study on the Development of Chinese Phonetics
    • The Lexical Variation Among Different Chinese Communities in 1990's (Mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan)
    • Study of resultative constructions in Mandarin Chinese
    • A Formal Treatment of Explicature and the Pragmatics of Conditional Statements
    • Translating Chinese martial arts fiction, with reference to the novels of Jin Yong
    • Whose strange stories? : a study of Herbert Giles' (1845-1935), translation of P'u Sung-ling's (1640-1715) Liao-chai Chih-i
    • Robert Morrison (1782-1834) : A Pioneer in Chinese-English Translation
    • A Study of Zhou Shoujuan's Translation of Western Fiction

    MPhil Theses
    • The vernacularization of standard Baihuawen during the period of 1917-1955
    • Constructing bilingual norms for bilingual program assessment : a study of bilingual writing performance of Cantonese-speaking students in Hong Kong (China) and Anglophone students in Montreal (Canada)
    • The Story of the Stone's Journey to the West: A Study in Chinese-English Translation History
    • A study of early translations of Sherlock Holmes in literary Chinese (1896-1916) : suspense and characterization
    • Lin Shu the translator : his truth and his lies : the images of the West and Africa
    • The Bawdy Bard in China - A Study of the Translation of Shakespeare's Sexually and Scatologically Suggestive Language
    • Culture, product category and advertising situation : a comparative study of advertising appeals in web automobile advertisements between the People's Republic of China and the United States of America.

    Current topics of research students

    • Advertising discourses and social changes in China
    • Bilingual education for majority-language students: a study of the bilingual education project for students in public schools of Shanghai with reference to Montreal and Hong Kong
    • Language contact and morphosyntactic borrowing: The case of Hong Kong Written Chinese
    • The problem of the BA construction in teaching Chinese as a second language
    • The syntactic representation of Cantonese sentence final particles
    • Syntax of non-verbal predication in Mandarin Chinese
    • A study of Lin Shu’s reading of Charles Dickens in his translations
    • Depressed systems of otherness behind translation: a case study of the Chinese versions of Hamlet
    • Translation, translation norms and ideology: a case study of the English translation of Shen Congwen’s short stories

  • Notes to Applicants 申请须知:

    Application to our postgraduate programmes could be done without any agency service. Applicants are required to apply online via the University’s website “study@polyu”: www.polyu.edu.hk/study
    Please note that all fields in the application forms should be filled. We will not consider applications that do not provide details of academic qualifications.
    申请人如欲报读本系硕士学位课程，毋须透过中介服务办理，可以直接在香港理工大学网站的「study@polyu」进行网上申请报读课程： www.polyu.edu.hk/study
    申請表上的所有項目均需填寫，學系將不會考慮沒有提供詳細學歷資料的申請表。