The research strategy of CBS has mainly focused on applied research related to biliteracy and trilingualism, yielding practical, concrete results with application value.
Objectives:
- to help solving language problems specific to Hong Kong, especially in Chinese language education and bilingual education;
- to train professionals and scholars who can play crucial roles in the competitive world of multilingualism;
- to build solid scholarly foundations for language in use, such as in corporate communication, language education, language technology, and language testing.
CBS has built a group of diverse and high-quality faculty members whose expertise covers such areas as:
Research conducted in the area of bilingualism, bilingual communication and bilingual education falls into four main areas, viz.,
- language-in-education issues such as policy and practices in bilingual education, construction of norms of bilingual (Chinese & English) development, profile studies of bilingual skills, as well as learner characteristics
- language use in professional contexts, such as that of the media
- languages-in-contact topics, such as language change and linguistic borrowing, and
- issues related to language and cultural adaptation of minority children and to intercultural communication among ethnic groups in Hong Kong.
Research conducted in the area of Chinese language teaching & testing falls into the following main categories, viz.,
- genre analysis, such as Chinese business correspondence
- development of multi-media material to facilitate the learning and teaching of Chinese
- instrumentation of studies related to test validity, reliability and norm construction
- theory and practice of Chinese instruction
- the external history of modern standard Chinese, and
- psycholinguistic issues such as pragmatic reasoning and testing
Research conducted in the area of Chinese language & linguistics can be grouped under three broad categories, i.e.
- modern standard Chinese (topics researched include Business Chinese, Chinese genres & registers, sociolinguistic history of Modern Standard Chinese)
- theoretical linguistics (topics researched include context-dependent properties, semantic properties, topic-subject ratio, sentence final particles, syntactic variation, and discourse analysis)
- vernacular studies (topics researched are related to Cantonese grammar, lexicon, graphical representation, and phonology in particular)
These topics are studied from the perspectives of descriptive linguistics, morphology, comparative/contrastive analysis, inter-dialectal and inter-lingual analysis, as well as that of psycholinguistics. Some projects have been particularly aimed at application in the areas of information technology, including machine translation, and special education.
Research conducted in the area of translation studies and interpreting studies falls into the following main categories, viz.:
- Translation studies and history of translation
- Applied translation studies: theories, processes, principles, strategies, methods and criteria for translating specific genres in practical writing
- Empirical studies of translation
- Interpreting studies
Research conducted in the area of Japanese studies falls into three main categories, viz.,
- task-based learning and teaching
- test-item writing in Japanese)
- L2 academic composition)
Research conducted in the area of teaching Chinese as a second language and second language acquisition falls into the following main categories, viz.,
- learner centered contrastive approaches to foreign language learning
- psychology and neural aspects of language acquisition
- learner tools (dictionaries, instructional materials, databases) creation and evaluation intercultural mediation
- acquisition of minority languages
- philological language learning
- pedagogical grammar for teaching Chinese as a foreign language
Research conducted in the area of corpus linguistics and computational linguistics falls into the following main categories, i.e.
- Chinese interface of computers
- Chinese language processing
- Ontology-lexicon interface
- Language resources
- Machine translation
- Computer-assisted language learning
- Modern Chinese characters
