Digital communication and social media have offered abundant new affordances and opportunities for new forms of language and literacy practices. Digital Literacies, as a key research area in the Department of English, is broadly defined as the development and application of digital resources in the research and teaching of language, literature, and communication. We also strive to engage our students through new media resources in their learning and research of English linguistics and literature.
Our faculty members have contributed actively to the development of online resources for English language and linguistics. In particular, online resources have been developed to facilitate the learning and research of World Englishes. Examples include:
Internet Grammar of English (also available in a simplified Chinese translation and as a mobile app) and the International Corpus of English (ICE), both managed by Gerald Nelson.
English Accents Worldwide and the History and Spread of English Worldwide, developed by Jette Hansen Edwards.
New forms of multimodal and multilingual texts and practices are constantly produced and consumed on social media and networked platforms. Carmen Lee’s extensive research on digital discourse has been concerned with the ways our online activities are closely tied to and embedded in our offline lived experiences, and the possible impact of digital discourse on our everyday language use. Jookyoung Jung focuses on psycholinguistic dimensions of digital literacy in association with L2 competence development. She explores L2 learners' internal processes while engaging in computer-mediated reading and writing tasks. Concerned with issues of equity, Ron Darvin examines how language learners of contrasting social positions, equipped with unequal digital repertoires, are socialized into diverse digital literacies. His research also examines inequalities in online spaces, as users position each other while negotiating the sociotechnical structures and algorithmic processes of digital platforms. In researching literature, Eddie Tay explores innovative ways to present poetry through street photography on his site Hong Kong Lucida.
The research laboratory in the Department of English provides a wide range of software to facilitate our research and teaching. See here for other digital resources available in the Department of English.