Using language is one of the most creative and distinctive activities that makes us human. We are aware of this creativity when we read imaginative literature, but we also experience it di-rectly in our own everyday language use. This course offers both a linguistic and literary per-spective on the various ways in which language influences and shapes such things as, our iden-tity, our emotions, our sense of humour, our experience of technology, and our membership to society. Students learn to analyse and appreciate a range of linguistic, literary and cultural phe-nomena, including works from the traditional genres of fiction, poetry and drama, as well as other media such as, film, song, and art. From a linguistic perspective, we examine the ways in which language is structured and used creatively for different purposes in both local and global contexts. From a literary perspective, we examine how the creative use of language in literary works is part of how we construct the world and make sense of our place in it. By focusing on different text and media from different times and places, this course aims to foster new under-standings of how language is a powerful tool in shaping our capacities to reflect on our own world and to imagine other worlds beyond it.

This course provides you with the communication skills necessary to perform various academic and non-academic tasks in both online and offline contexts. It demonstrates how differences in audience, communicative purpose and medium shape the content and structure of various written and spoken genres. It also discusses different patterns of development such as narration, description, exemplification, and persuasion, and the importance of thesis statements and topic sentences in organizing ideas. To help you develop an awareness of the structural and stylistic differences of various genres, you will produce a personal reflective essay, a literary analysis paper, and a persuasive presentation, that will be presented in various print, face-to-face and digital formats, using both linguistic and multimodal resources. Through a process oriented approach, you will be producing outlines and drafts of these writing tasks, get feedback, and learn writing strategies such as using sensory details, choosing active, specific verbs, and employing cohesive devices. Recognizing how technology shapes communication practices in diverse ways, this course also draws attention to the affordances and constraints of digital tools such as WordPress, Blackboard, Zoom, and social media platforms.

This course builds on the foundational communication skills introduced in ENGE 1310 and helps you develop the competencies necessary to conduct effective research. It examines the existing structures and conventions of various print and digital genres such as journal articles, blogs, infographics, and YouTube videos. It also discusses different patterns of development such as definition, problem/ solution, comparison/ contrast, classification and division, and the importance of maintaining an appropriate register and style. To help you produce and consume knowledge in creative and critical ways, you will construct an abstract, an annotated bibliography, a literature review, a video, and a research article that discusses an issue in applied linguistics. These texts will be constructed for real world audiences and will involve the use of various multimodal resources. Through a process-oriented approach, you will be producing outlines and drafts of these writing tasks, get feedback, and learn writing strategies such as signposting, using signal phrases, and constructing parallel structures. Recognizing the increasing importance of technology in producing and consuming knowledge, this course also discusses the use of various digital tools such as search engines, reference management software, blogging and video editing platforms.

This course offers an overview of the linguistic structure of English. We systematically study the English language and human language in general at various levels: words, phrases, sentences and beyond. It also provides students with the opportunity to observe and explain the ways in which English is used in everyday life.

This course is designed to provide students with the terminology and analytical skills necessary to describe the grammatical structure of English sentences and their parts. The grammatical concepts and categories introduced in this course are largely ‘traditional’, and common to the competing schools of linguistics.

This course will introduce students to methods of reading literary texts from the major genres of fiction, poetry, and drama. It will illustrate basic literary terms and concepts, and closely study a variety of literary texts written in different times and countries. The emphasis will be on close reading, analysing how the meaning of a literary text is informed by its formal elements and literary conventions. At the same time, the course will also give students an awareness of the interaction between text and context, creative writing and critical reception, and the inheritance and transformation of literary tradition.

Students will study short plays and excerpts from longer plays, workshop them in small groups, with the aim of performing pieces of similar length before an audience. Students will be taught how to interpret a play from a dramaturgical point of view, and be equipped with the fundamental techniques of voice production, creating a character, directing, and interpreting a text for performance.

What is a hero? The stories we read, as well as the movies and television programmes we watch are full of heroism, but do we really know what a hero is? Does a hero have to be good? Do they have to be strong? Do they have to win in the end? Do we have to like them? This course will address many of these questions in relation to many different texts from a wide variety of media: from one of the earliest surviving texts of the ancient world, The Epic of Gilgamesh to the recent global phenomenon, Game of Thrones. We will look especially at the way heroes are shaped by the monsters that they do battle against. Some monsters are fought with fists and swords, but others must be defeated through other means for they lie within the hero himself.

(UGED2195 is double-coded with ENGE2110.) This course takes a closer look at the genre of crime fiction. The course outlines a broad perspective of the genre of crime fiction from its earliest incarnations to modern-day TV drama. We will explore a variety of different forms of crime fiction, and how the genre more generally reflects cultural, historical and social issues. The study material for this course will consist of literary texts, TV series, and films drawn from the popular cultural canon. Topics we will discuss include conspiracy, serial crime, trauma, the epistemology of clues, history and crime, and the criminal mind. The course begins with a historical overview of detective fiction, and concludes with a creative workshop on how to write a detective story. Students with a taste for murder, crime, and suspense — and above all the desire to solve enigmas and mysteries — are welcome to attend this course.

(UGED2186 is double-coded with ENGE2130.) Why read literature? This course offers a broad look through literary history to understand the enduring value and diversity of literature. For each lecture, we will look at a literary masterpiece — from antiquity to the present — and address three main issues: A) the work and its historical context; B) how to read it; and C) themes that make the work relevant in contemporary society and in our everyday lives. The course is designed as an introductory survey of literary works that have had a major impact throughout the ages. Issue A) is intended to give students a sense of the work’s impact in its own time; B) is designed to provide students with the conceptual tools and methodologies to understand a classic work of literature; while C) will provide students with an opportunity to make connections between their own individual concerns and those of the great characters of literature. At the end of the course, students will have encountered some of the most esteemed classics in literary history. No previous studies in literature needed to take this course. Students interested in discussing the ideas, ideals and values of classic literary texts are welcome to attend this course.

(UGED2187 is double-coded with ENGE2140.) What’s a hero? What’s a superhero? Why and when do we need superheroes? How to be one and who gets to be one? We will begin by tracing the origins of this enduring pop fiction, from the hero’s journey in antiquity to the outbreak of the Second World War. We will also explore the moral ambiguity and mixed values of some of the most memorable characters. Furthermore, we will examine revisionist approaches to the superhero genre that respond to the hopes and disillusionments of the contemporary era. Topics covered will include good and evil, power and identity, and justice and responsibility. You may also have the chance to design your own superheroes. It is hoped that by the end of the course, you will develop new ways of reading superhero narratives as uniquely modern myths.

This course studies the relationship between words on the page and audio-visual moving images on the screen by focusing on the adaptations of classic English novels of the nineteenth century. We will look at several nineteenth-century English authors who have been particularly popular with screen adaptations: Austen, Dickens, and Hardy. By close reading of their texts and careful viewing of the big and small screen adaptations of these novels, we will consider the specificity of the textual and the visual media in the narrative, thematic, and aesthetic aspects. The course will explore the interaction between literature and film/television in terms of forms and stylistics, and make broader cultural and historical enquiries about the issues of gender, class, nationhood, and nature that will illuminate nineteenth-century literature in general and its relevance to the present.

Focusing on song writers and performers from the USA, this course introduces students to the art of the popular song lyric of the twentieth century. In the process of studying American popular song lyrics, students will learn about such musical genres as “the blues,” “gospel,” “tin pan alley,” “folk,” “country,” and “rock and roll” as well as the elements of American history that give rise to each of these types of musical lyric. Since one of the course elements is the relationship of musical lyric to musical sound, we will spend considerable class time listening to popular songs , paying attention to the way a lyric’s meaning is conveyed through such elements as vocal style and musical arrangement.

This interdisciplinary course of critical medical humanities examines contemporary literary and filmic texts that shape ethical thought about health and wellbeing. We will read major texts that problematize and hypothesize the relation between self and community; immunity and toxicity; power and medical interventions; faith and healing; and knowledge and narrative. This course aims to widen the “medical” beyond the scene of clinical encounter through close engagements with critical theory about the body and the self as embodied subjectivity. In our readings, we will discuss and debate the meaning and practices of responsibility, endurance, and imagination that challenge assumptions about the illness experience, caregiving, and the production of medical knowledge.

(UGED2197 is double-coded with ENGE2190.) The course will consider myths and legends from around the world with particular sensitivity to one peculiar aspect of them: that the gods depicted in them often behave no better than the people whose lives they determine. In order to explain why this is the case, the course will seek to understand the nature and function of myth, and the complex uses to which they are put in order to explain some of our most pressing questions: How did we all begin? Where are we? Who are we? Why is there so much wrong with the world? What’s the solution? Where will we go when we die? How will it all end? Although the concept of myth might seem outdated in modern secular culture, by drawing comparisons between the ancient and contemporary worlds, students will be encouraged to see how myth-making of some kind is as inevitable and innately human as the questions which prompt it. The course will begin by establishing some archetypal similarities between myths – from myths of Creation to myths of Apocalypse – and then consider myths from specific cultures – including Greco-Roman, Scandinavian, and Chinese – before considering the appeal of myth in contemporary popular culture, especially The Lord of Rings, and Game of Thrones.

This course takes a closer look at the intimate connections between song and poetry. The history of song has always been closely connected with the oral tradition in literature; conversely, the musicality of literature owes much to the song tradition. Gospel, Negro Spirituals, Folk Music, the Bard Tradition, the Sean Nós tradition, the ballad and the lyric form in poetry, as well as popular music and musicals will all be examined on this course. The course will examine the different song traditions in their social and political contexts. The course will also include a song-writing element. There will be a song-writing workshop with a well-known local songwriter. Students will be asked to write a song in any genre of their choice (folk song, protest song, spiritual song etc.) and then to have that song performed either by themselves or someone else in the class. No previous studies in literature or music are needed to take this course. Students interested in exploring the connections between song and poetry and between song-writing and the poetic craft are welcome to attend this course.

This course looks at the close relationship between existentialist philosophy and literature. Existentialism is a philosophical movement that focuses on human existence and the challenges of choice, freedom, and responsibility in the modern world. We will explore a variety of existentialist positions—including those of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, and de Beauvoir—to understand how existentialist thought constitutes an important intellectual context for many themes in modern literature, including authenticity, alienation, and anxiety. Authors to be discussed include Kafka, Dostoevsky, Ionesco, Camus, Beckett and others. Students interested in literary representations of the existential challenges of the human condition are welcome to attend this course.

The first half of this course will focus on representative European and American plays of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries and trace their significance in the development of modern and contemporary drama. The second half of the course will explore twenty-first century plays and their relationship to some of the most pressing questions of the contemporary period. As students become familiar with the major styles, concepts, and figures of modern and contemporary drama, they will also develop an awareness of the historical contexts from which the plays emerge and the social and cultural issues to which they respond. Finally, students will investigate drama as both a written text and a performance event and, through their readings, discussions, and assignments, gain an appreciation of its uniqueness as a “living” art form. The course readings will include plays by the following authors: Henrik Ibsen, Bertolt Brecht, Arthur Miller, Samuel Beckett, Caryl Churchill, Ayad Akhtar, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, and Lynn Nottage.

(UGED2194 is double-coded with ENGE2360.) This course provides a framework for understanding the themes and motifs of children’s literature. It also looks at representations of children in literature. We will analyse some essential, central texts as well as contemporary popular books for children. The uses of fantasy and the educational aspects of books for children will be discussed, along with notions of childhood and adulthood. Through close reading of set texts, students will be able to engage in critical techniques applicable to most literature. This is because the best texts for children satisfy sensitive adult readers too.

This course examines some of the key works of dystopian fiction written in the twentieth-century. It does so by thinking about the ways in which the book – that common symbol of culture and civilization – is treated in these works. The course begins by contextualizing the notion of dystopia and its cognates. After revealing a strong link between the dystopian image and the emasculation of culture, we move on to consider the particular visions of society presented by Ray Bradbury, George Orwell, and Anthony Burgess. As we shall see, they are visions of society that insist that we not only question our idea of “culture” but also how culture itself intervenes in the inevitable tension between state and individual.

This course provides an introduction to the art of reading poetry. We will read and analyze a range of poems of diverse styles and forms from the Renaissance to the present day so as to stimulate students’ creative and critical responses to poetry. We will also read and analyze contemporary poetry written in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore. While this is not a course on creative writing, it nonetheless explores, among other topics, the role of the imagination, the act of writing, the purposes of poetry, the notions of tradition and of the individual talent, for these are issues with which poets engage, whether directly or indirectly, in their poems.

This course introduces students to basic concepts in phonetics, the scientific study of speech, and in phonology, the study of sound patterns in various human languages with principal emphasis on the English language. Students will gain an understanding of the articulatory mechanisms for producing consonants, vowels, as well as stress and intonation. They will be introduced to the International Phonetic Alphabet, and sounds from a variety of languages. In the phonology part of the course, students will analyze the patterns governing the distribution of sounds in different languages. A major aim of this course is to enable students to transcribe English words and utterances, and to develop an appreciation of the diversity and systematicity of sound structure in human language.

(UGEC2188 is double-coded with ENGE2530.) The objective of this course is to give students an overview of the status, features, and use of Hong Kong English (HKE), the variety of English commonly used in Hong Kong. In the first part of the course, students will be introduced to the concept of ‘world Englishes’ and examine different theoretical frameworks for conceptualizing the evolution of new varieties of English. The course then examines the history of English in Hong Kong in juxtaposition to both Cantonese and Putonghua, politically and in terms of educational policies and practices in Hong Kong. The second part of the course examines both spoken and written features of HKE, including grammar, discourse particles, vocabulary, and pronunciation, as well as the practices of code-mixing and code-switching. In the third part of the course, language attitudes and ideologies towards ‘standard’ language varieties (for example American and British English) in relation to HKE will be explored. The course will also examine the relationship between use of HKE and identity as well as gender.

This course introduces the role linguistics and linguists play in forensic science and legal investigations. Forensic linguists are like the Sherlock Holmes of language – they offer their expert opinions about linguistic evidence in the legal process. This course introduces some major topics in forensic linguistics, including authorship analysis, speaker identification, trial discourse, plagiarism and collusion, and linguistic evidence in cybercrime. High profile cases where forensic linguists have contributed to legal investigations will be discussed. Students will also be introduced the methods and tools commonly used in forensic linguistic analyses of spoken and written data. No prior knowledge of law is required.

(UGEC2189 is double-coded with ENGE2600.) Although English has long spread around the world, the consequences of this spread are only now beginning to be appreciated by its speakers in their many locations. The discourse of world Englishes aims to re-imagine our understanding of the English language. The difference between error and innovation can no longer be decided by reference to ‘ownership’ of the language. Additionally, the language is beginning to be a medium of the expression of identity for more and more people in very different contexts. World English must be pluralized, which is why we think in terms of world Englishes. This course is split into two sections. The first section will introduce you to issues in the discourse of world Englishes: innovation, variety, creativity, globalization, etc. The second section will look at specific case studies of Asian Englishes, such as the use of English in Singapore, China, and Japan.

This module will review and critique past and current theories of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) from a range of theoretical perspectives: linguistic, cognitive, psychological and social. It will also examine the wide range of factors which affect the outcome of SLA. It will then continue by outlining the implications for teaching and learning and how far these have an impact on approaches, methods, strategies and techniques in the classroom.

This course serves as a general introduction to the field of sociolinguistics – the study of the relationship between language and society. Students will be introduced to basic theories, research methods, and analytical tools in sociolinguistics. They will also be given opportunities to investigate the link between language practices and social factors (e.g., ethnicity, gender, and class). Topics covered in this course include code-switching, language variation and change, language in the media, styles, identity, language attitudes, as well as language policy. Examples will be drawn from a wide range of social contexts, with a focus on the English language. Sociolinguistic topics in Hong Kong are given particular consideration.

Students will study short plays and excerpts from longer plays, workshop them in small groups, with the aim of performing pieces of similar length before an audience. Students will be taught how to interpret a play from a dramaturgical point of view, and be equipped with the fundamental techniques of voice production, creating a character, directing, and interpreting a text for performance. The specific focus of this course will be comedy.

This course aims to help students enhance their communication with people who have a different language and cultural background. Topics include the concept of culture; language and cultural socialization; cultural variations in verbal and nonverbal communication; language, identity and biases; cultural diversity in perception, values, and worldview; intercultural-intimate relationships; culture shock and intercultural adjustment/adaptation; intercultural conflict and mediation; and English in the global workplace. This course should be of interest to local and international students, and is especially appropriate for those who plan to travel, study, or work abroad.

The aim of this course is to equip students with the grammatical knowledge that is essential for ESL teaching and learning. The first part of the course introduces students to key concepts involved in grammar pedagogy and teaching methodologies. The second part of the course covers grammatical forms and structures in English that may be particularly difficult for second language learners to acquire, with an emphasis on understanding the connection between form and meaning. Students apply what they have learned through conducting mini-lessons and team-teaching. At the end of the course, students should feel more confident about the use of grammar terminology in second language teaching and more knowledgeable about a task-based and discourse-oriented approach to grammar teaching in second language classrooms.

Prerequisite: ENGE 1520

This course is an introduction to the study of how language is used to communicate meanings. The earlier part of the course will deal with semantics, under two broad headings: lexical semantics (word meanings) and grammatical semantics (sentence meanings). Major topics in this part will include compositionality, semantic fields, prototype theory, and thematic roles. The second part of the course will deal with pragmatics, that is, how language communicates meanings in context. Major topics in this part will include speech acts, conversational implicatures, and politeness. The course will also look at idiomatic meanings and metaphor as ways of extending the semantic resources of language.

This course introduces students to the study of English words and vocabulary acquisition. In the first part of the course, we will look at the evolution of the English vocabulary such as historical influences and semantic change. Then we will look at English morphology and word formation, which will be followed by topics on meaning relations and semantic fields. In the second part of the course, the focus will shift to the acquisition of vocabulary and we will start by discussing whether English has a core vocabulary and what it means to know a word. Then topics on semantic transfer, collocation, academic vocabulary and also practical techniques in vocabulary teaching will be covered.

Students will be selected by a panel of senior staff based on achievement in relevant Department courses and willingness and likely capacity to benefit. Classes will be divided in two strands: “Literature, Linguistics and Society”; “Current Affairs: Britain and the World”. Oxford tutors will conduct 4 hours’ face-to-face teaching a day for 5 days a week. Students will spend some evenings and weekend days in excursions to London and Stratford for plays and other cultural sites. Fieldwork and cultural explorations will be closely supervised by College nominees and/or Department staff. Full reflective essays and diary-plus-video are required of all participants for presentation within CUHK at their own college presentation evenings, and to other English Department majors at university orientation events. Each student on return will be expected to volunteer for either a teaching role for underprivileged students or one of CUHK’s ICARE service projects (Possibility of financial contribution being waived for needier candidates). Classes will take place in St Hilda’s College Oxford for 3 weeks during the summer term, between second and third years.

The aim of the course is to build on the skills that students acquired in previous communication courses and to further enhance their writing and speaking competence in preparation for more advanced major courses and also the future workplace. Using a short novel as the basis for three written assignments, students will practice how to summarize, interpret and analyze literary texts. Feedback from peers and teachers will enable students to identify areas for improvement and polish their writing skills. Next, the course will provide guidance to students for writing their cover letters and resumes with the purpose of highlighting their strengths, accomplishments and aspirations. In the last past of the course, we will discuss how to prepare for job interviews and conduct practice to hone students’ oral self-presentation skills. It is hoped that by the end of the course, students can become competent and confident users of English across a variety of contexts and requirements.

The course will involve an in-depth study of Romanticism and evaluate its significance in English poetic tradition. It will cover the six major Romantic poets, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats, and from some characteristics they share, outline the ‘sprit’ of their age. At the same time, the course will also emphasise the distinctiveness of each Romantic poet, to demonstrate the complexity and diversity contained in the term ‘Romanticism’. We will study the representative poems of each poet carefully in relation to his aesthetic ideas and life experience. The course will emphasise close reading, but it will also draw attention to the relationship between text and context, poetry and poet, poetic creation and critical value.

This course introduces students to Modernism as a literary and historical movement which attempted to redefine the major concepts of art, the role of artist and the value of aesthetics as offered and established by tradition. Emphasis will be put on the historical factors and implications of this significant cultural change from tradition to modernity. Works to be discussed may be drawn from poetry, drama, fiction, as well as other creative and critical forms of discourse.

This course may range from a concentrated study of specific topics to considerations of general principles in aesthetics/ philosophy. Under this course heading, various inter-disciplinary or comparative studies of literature and other subjects can be offered, for example, literature and painting/ sculpture, literature and architecture, literature and music, and others.

(UGED3143 is double-coded with ENGE3220.) The aim of this course is to familiarize students with the kindred relationships between film and literature as well as their essential mediumistic differences such as film and the novel, film and drama/theatre, film and poetry, etc. Their similar or different uses of time and space, and problems of adaptation will be discussed in some works which have both filmic and literary versions.

This course is structured as: (i) a series of writing workshops; and (ii) projects that facilitate the writing of poetry. While we will look at the manifestos of poets and explore debates in the field of poetics, the bulk of this course is ultimately focused on the act of writing. We will explore how one may learn from the works of canonical poets so as to hone one’s writing skills. There also will be some emphasis on exploring local and international publishing avenues, whether online or in print. There will also be sessions on how to present one’s own poems.

This course aims first to introduce students to autobiography, one of the most popular forms of writing in the contemporary world. It will raise such questions as, why has this kind of narrative been so attractive to writers in cross-cultural situations, such as Chinese-Americans? The course will focus specifically on a group of (mainly American) immigrant autobiographers who write about the experience of living between a first language and English. They raise a range of fascinating questions about language and identity. Students will be asked to reflect on these questions and on the similarities and differences between these writers’ lives and their own experience in Hong Kong. The course will aim to teach students how to approach, analyse and theorize about autobiographical narratives. Students will be given opportunity to develop their analytical skills in essay-type responses to the prescribed texts. They will also be given opportunity to develop their narrative skills in their own life-writing, using the prescribed texts as models. Both forms of written exercise are designed to extend, as well as test, students’ understanding of autobiography as a genre.

The aim of the course is to introduce students to the art of the short story. Through reading well-crafted stories, students will learn how to appreciate short fiction and become familiar with the different elements of the short story form: plot, point of view, dialogue and action, character development as well as language, voice and style. A main focus of the course will be to look at how language is used and manipulated to create meaning in the texts.

Human beings tell stories to find meaning and make sense of their lives. We are born with the need to listen to stories – and to tell them. Students who are interested in writing short stories will be able to apply the techniques discussed in class to their own work and have their stories workshopped.

This course investigates Hong Kong literature in English from the twentieth century onwards, looking at its representations of Hong Kong, its people, and its varying political and social issues. The texts in this course were published originally in English and written either by Hong Kong authors, and/or set significantly in Hong Kong. They were chosen for the importance that Hong Kong plays in them in a wide variety of ways. Set in different decades, written in different genres, and drawing on a range of themes, these works allow us to appreciate the unique vibrancy, hybridity and contradictions that comprise Hong Kong: for instance, as a rural but also urban space; as a place of restless transition but also as a permanent home; and as a place of both divide and continuity across generations and cultural groups. We will constantly move between literary and theoretical exploration and their application to real-life issues in Hong Kong, encouraging students’ sense of personal participation in constructing individual notions of what “Hong Kong” means.

This course is designed to investigate topics in creative writing not normally covered under generic creative writing courses. It may involve any one or more of the following areas in creative writing studies: literary community and global citizenship, writing for new media, creative writing and other arts, creative writing and social enterprises, phenomenology and creative writing, creative writing and research, writing speculative fiction, writing flash fiction, teaching creative writing, history of creative writing, and the writing of auto-ethnography. Students are allowed to take the above course more than once and gain the units each time they pass the course. However, students cannot take courses with the same course code more than once in a single term.

This course focuses on the art of writing about Hong Kong. Through the use of writing prompts, it introduces students to the different ways of writing about different social and physical environments in Hong Kong. Students will be able to discuss and articulate the feelings, thoughts and experiences evoked by these social and physical environments. They will be able to produce writings that evoke the sense of place that is unique to Hong Kong. They will be able to consider issues such as genre, gender and language use in relation to readership. Through active participation in class discussion and exploration of actual environments, students will acquire different perspectives and understand the diverse possibilities in relation to writing about Hong Kong. They will be able to assess their own writing and those of others.

For the last one hundred years or so, the respected literary critic was one who conducted a patient, private, close reading of an inevitably small number of texts. Today, due to the rampant digitization of hundreds of thousands of texts and radical developments in the accessibility of statistical analysis packages and platforms, the literary critic has been emancipated from working in only this way. This course introduces you to the field of computational literary analysis, which is to say a new way of engaging literary texts that takes advantage of such developments. By way of practice-based learning, you will learn to use the basic functionality of R – the leading language and platform for statistical computing and graphics in the humanities – in order to ask very different questions of literature to those that you typically learn to ask on an English literature programme. Importantly, the answers that you receive to such novel questions might just surprise you.

This course will study literature that represents visual arts or, ekphrasis. The term ‘ekphrasis’ can be broadly defined as verbal representation of visual arts and has become a vibrant field of study for a few decades. We will look at some most famous ekphrastic texts from the beginning of Western literature to this day, focusing on poems evoking either actual or imaginary artworks, but branching out to ekphrasis in fiction and new media as well. In the process, we will reflect on the evolution of the term ‘ekphrasis’ from a rhetorical device to a site of rivalry and on to a mode of encounter between the verbal and visual medium. The course will explore interactions of multiple media while foregrounding characteristics of each medium.

This course introduces students to the history and methods of documentary poetry, focusing on both critical appreciation and creative practice, and offering opportunities to conduct their own practice-based creative research. Documentary poems represent a public event or historical moment by incorporating news accounts, photographs, legal records, or other archival materials into poetic writing. In this course, we’ll explore why documentary poetry is increasingly popular among contemporary poets who seek to make an impact in public conversations. The course traces the ways contemporary poets build on the tradition of documentary poetry, and asks how documentary practices are changing as public and private archives become more available through digitization. In order to explore new approaches to generating creative work ourselves, the course alternates several practicum-style skills workshops with writing workshops and seminar-style discussions of assigned readings. Over the course of the term, we’ll combine poetry-writing, visual arts, and literary journalism approaches with archival research and digital humanities skills, making our own original documentary poetic projects using compositional tools ranging from scissors and tape, to digital image manipulation software, to computational poetry programs. Previous experience with the course tools is not required; the only prerequisite is an interest in language, history, and how we remember our world together.

This course introduces students to the playwright William Shakespeare. By reading a number of Shakespeare’s plays, drawn from the genres of comedy, history, tragedy and romance, students will achieve an understanding of Shakespeare’s language, his modes of characterization, his methods of creating dramatic situations, and his representative themes. Students will also study the relationship of Shakespeare’s scripts to their original Elizabethan and Jacobean performance contexts. Time permitting, attention will also be given to the performance history of Shakespearean drama and the continuing importance of that drama in twentieth-first century world theatre.

The aim of the course is to introduce students to the basic concepts in contrastive linguistics through a comparative study of English and Chinese. The course will begin by introducing students to language transfer for a better understanding of the role of L1 in second language learning. English and Chinese will then be compared on the phonological, morphological and lexical levels. Different skills required in reading English and Chinese will also be introduced. Next, we move on to conceptual metaphors and will look at the use of metaphorical expressions in the two languages. In the lecture on contrastive pragmatics, we will explore how politeness strategies differ across cultures, with the focus on compliment response strategies. Then the major grammatical, syntactic and textual features of English and Chinese will be presented and some salient contrasts between them will be highlighted. The findings of such an English-Chinese contrastive analysis will be highly relevant to language teaching and learning as differences between the two languages are commonly reflected in errors made by second language learners.

This undergraduate course is an introduction to psycholinguistics — the study of how human beings comprehend, produce, and acquire language in vivo. This is in contrast to the more static view on language or the study of it in other areas of theoretical linguistics. One guiding question in this course is what psycho-linguistic mechanisms support the unique human capacity for language (and how they operate). We will explore this question from a multi-disciplinary perspective, combining insights and tools from cognitive psychology, linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, and computer science. Topics we will cover include visual and auditory recognition of words, sentence comprehension, speech production and errors, language acquisition, neural representation of language, bilingual language processing, simultaneous interpretation, aphasia and language disorders. In this course, students will learn to design psycholinguistic experiments using experimental paradigms such as priming, self-paced reading, and language switching tasks. Other advanced methodologies (e.g. electrophysiology, eye-tracking, and fMRI technologies) will also be introduced.

This course is designed for students who are interested in the teaching and learning of English as a foreign/second language. The course examines different aspects of English language teaching, including the four major skill areas – reading, writing, listening, and speaking – as well as the teaching of grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. In the examination of these different language areas, the course first focuses on the acquisition and development of these areas, asking the question of how learners acquire/develop vocabulary/grammar/pronunciation as well as reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills in the foreign/second language. After the learning and development of each of these skill areas has been examined, the course focuses on the teaching of each of these areas. In this discussion, the course will examine curriculum design, models, tasks, and techniques for teaching each language area.

This course introduces some major approaches as well as basic principles and tools in the analysis of texts. Concepts such as cohesion and coherence, relevance, context, and identity are drawn upon to analyze a range of discourses and text types in our contemporary society. Texts to be discussed include advertisements, news reports, interviews, political speeches, websites, book reviews, etc. The relevance of discourse analysis to foreign/second language teaching may also be considered.

This course provides an introduction to the relationship between gender and language use. Drawing from empirical and theoretical studies in sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and discourse analysis, this course addresses a range of issues. Examples of key issues include the acquisition of gender-differentiated language, gender and conversational interaction (e.g. extralinguistic constructions of gender or politeness, hedging or interruptions), sexism in language, gender images, and the relationships among language, gender, and other social constructs such as class, culture, and ethnicity.

There are two constant properties of language: variation and change. Languages vary in form across geographic space and social groups, and linguistic forms evolve over time, adapting to the society in which they are embedded. It makes sense to study these together because of their intricate links: if a language undergoes different transformations in different areas or subgroups, then variation results. As such, studying language change can help us to understand variation, and the nature of linguistic variation provides evidence as to how language changes. The course will focus on variation and change as a window to understanding the nature of language. It will cover topics related to these two properties such as language attitudes, historical change, and language contact. A sizeable number of case studies will be drawn from English. To strengthen the links between theoretical knowledge and practice, students will work hands-on with sociolinguistic data and attempt to analyze them using the framework of language variation and change.

This course provides an undergraduate-level overview of research methods within the field of applied linguistics. It provides students with vital skills necessary for designing, conducting, and evaluating research projects centered on language use and communication in real-world contexts, in anticipation of research endeavors like their final year or capstone projects. Participants will be introduced to research paradigms and principles tailored to applied linguistics, in addition to various research methodologies. These encompass quantitative methods like experiments and corpus-based studies, as well as qualitative approaches such as case studies and ethnographic research. The course places a particular emphasis on the practical application of these methods within the realm of applied (English) linguistics.

The course delves into an extensive array of data collection techniques commonly employed in applied linguistics research, including surveys, narrative studies, ethnographic observations, and corpus analysis. Through class activities, students will develop the skills needed to select the most suitable methods for their research questions, construct data collection instruments, and efficiently manage and analyze data sets. The course covers data analysis techniques encompassing both quantitative and qualitative methods. Students will have the opportunity to analyze quantitative data using statistical software and interpret the results, as well as to develop skills in the analysis of qualitative data, employing methods like thematic analysis and critical analysis. Several hands-on activities will be provided to encourage students to actively interact with and better grasp the concepts.

This course is designed to help undergraduate students understand the underlying processes involved in reading in English as a second language. The course will begin with fundamental theories on cognitive processes of first and second language reading, such as process models and component models. The course then reviews various components of second language reading, such as working memory, background knowledge (schema), and L2 linguistic knowledge (vocabulary and grammar). In addition, this course will invite students to discuss how to better utilize English reading to promote the development of English proficiency, with particular attention to tasks and technology use.

This internship course is designed to bridge students’ academic studies with real-world professional experience, offering a unique opportunity to apply classroom knowledge in a practical work environment. By integrating academic theories, practices, and skills with workplace applications, students will gain hands-on experience and deepen their understanding of how English is used in professional settings.
Students are required to complete a minimum of 200 hours of full-time or part-time work at either local or international organizations where English is used for internal and external communication. While the department provides a range of pre-approved host organizations, students may also propose self-found internships, subject to the approval of the course leader.
To prepare for the recruitment process, students must attend all the workshops organized by Course leader and two mandatory workshops from the Career Planning and Development (CPDC) from the Office of Student Affairs, CUHK. This course ultimately fosters critical reflection on the relevance and effectiveness of classroom learning in professional contexts, equipping students with valuable skills for their future careers.

In this course, students will delve into the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) and human language. The course will primarily focus on English, while also challenging students to think critically about the relevance of the course material to their own languages or languages of interest. The course takes a multi-faceted approach, combining lectures, presentations, and hands-on activities to equip students with a solid understanding of AI fundamentals. As the course progresses, students will explore how computers process and generate human language, as well as how AI can be used to analyze language data. Ultimately, they will critically evaluate various AI-based techniques, while applying them to investigate key questions about human language. The course curriculum includes modules on language and computers, learner corpora, text preprocessing, speech-to-text, data visualization, and more.

This objective of this course is to (a) provide an overview of a variety of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, (b) enable students to evaluate AI technologies, and (c) facilitate students to apply AI technologies to identify key problems in their major field (e.g., business, education, philosophy, social science) and/or explore potential solutions for those problems. It incorporates a hybrid approach combining lecture segments and hands-on activities so that students are able to have a better understanding of what AI is and how AI technologies have been used for diverse purposes. The first part of the course focuses on exploring a variety of applications (and programming codes in Python) for image creation, text mining, web crawling, modelling, speech recognition, conversation, etc. In the second part, students work on developing a website where they introduce and discuss the problems and solutions of their interest, which are explored using AI technologies.

The power of data is recognizable – now more than ever. Data has always existed and now has taken center stage in the world and its industries, especially in recent years. In this course, you will learn how to leverage your data, that is, learn how to transform it into something meaningful and useful for scientific research. Building on your prior knowledge of digital literacy, statistics, and programming, we will delve deeper into contemporary topics and approaches in Data Science and statistics as it relates to the English language. Unlike other data science and statistics courses, this course is designed for students who have already the foundations of data science but hope to specialize in, conduct research on, or create projects related to the English language and linguistics. Following a topical approach, we will explore more advanced topics in data management, processing, statistics, and data visualization using the programming tool R, covering trending topics like dimensionality reduction, natural language processing, and machine learning and how these are applied to the study of English. You will gain a contextualized understanding of statistics and practical skills for tackling core data scientific challenges relevant to the field.

The study of the intersection between language, text, and computation is a rapidly developing field with broad applicability throughout the social sciences and the humanities. Being able to analyze linguistic and textual data is a highly useful skill for in academic work, in the private sector, and government-related work. The course intends to build on your prior knowledge of digital literacy, statistics, and programming and delves deeper into contemporary topics in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and data science as it relates to linguistics and the social sciences (e.g., anthropology, history, psychology, and sociology). It is designed for students who hope to explore language data using NLP techniques. Students will get first-hand experience working with state-of-the-art software in corpus linguistics, NLP, and data science (i.e., Python, CasualConc). They will learn contextualized techniques to parse and collate information from text-rich documents, such as corpora as well as social media. This course assumes that students have a rudimentary knowledge of Python, linguistics, and data analysis.

In this course, we will study the works of some of the major writers in English literature in the twentieth century (with the exception of one text, White Teeth, which was published in 2000 and is therefore strictly speaking a twenty-first century text) through close reading. The chronological treatment of the works will allow us to explore the progression from literary modernism to postmodernism in the twentieth century. However, the course is not interested in stable, fixed definitions of “modernism” or “postmodernism,” nor is it primarily about modernism or postmodernism. Although there will be reference to philosophically or theoretically important thinkers throughout, the focus is really on the literary texts, and their varied and idiosyncratic modernisms and postmodernisms. Deliberately basing our course on very broad conceptions of “modernism” and “postmodernism,” we will not work with a fixed, exhaustive list of characteristics, but instead discover our own list in the works studied.

The course will examine a variety of literary themes and critical issues, such as identity, power, gender, purpose, religion, terrorism, conformity, transgression, genetics, multiculturalism, and the interaction between form and content. It will also analyze the socio-historical contexts behind the works, in order to understand how the historical background helped shape the works. This will encourage a comparative approach between the authors and their context, with the purpose of deepening students’ understanding of the course material, and of how writers mutually influenced each other.

Apart from this focus on text and context, the course will ask students to actively link themes and theoretical ideas to our own context of Hong Kong through the tutorial presentations and a short visual/textual assignment to be shared with coursemates on Blackboard. This will enable us to see how the literary works covered are connected to the space in which we are studying them (in our own lives and in Hong Kong), and to practise expressing these links to others.

Some of the questions the course will ask are: What were the contributions made by a particular author to the development of literature? Are there any common themes we can discover in works by different writers, and why were these themes so important to them? What do the writing styles that different writers have tell us about their methodology and philosophy? How did the earlier authors engage with modernity, and the later ones with postmodernity? And how are these works directly relevant to us here in Hong Kong today?

This course will introduce different issues and questions concerning literature, with the goal of allowing you to find questions to ask that best suit your own literary interests. Accordingly, the course will look at different questions to see what they offer us when we read different kinds of literature – different genres, from different places, and from different times. Whatever your literary interests, and whatever you may be planning to write about in future (for example, in the ‘Capstone’ course), this course will help you find suitable questions and ideas. In short, we will be thinking about different questions and asking them about different literary works. The issues we think about in this course should be ones you can return to again in future literary study – and, in principle, beyond your studies. Instead of introducing schools of literary criticism (feminism, structuralism, Marxism, etc.), this course will look at different critical questions that we can ask about literature – i.e. different issues in literary criticism. Different questions lead to different answers. This is not to say that all questions are equally good, and you will also get a chance to ask why certain questions are asked and others are ignored. The course book (Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory) is not a survey of different critical schools. Instead, it looks at the different questions we might ask about literature in thirty-eight very short chapters, each time exploring the issue through discussion of specific literature. It is often surprising in its choice of issues: mutants, laughter, ghosts, and moving pictures are all covered. Pleasure and creativity are also covered, and the creative style of the book raises a further question – how should we write about literature?

This course is the Creative Writing Stream’s advanced writing workshop elective. In this course, you will hone your skills in a particular genre (poetry, fiction, life writing, or dramatic writing) by receiving sustained, detailed feedback from a workshop leader and your peers in a focused, intimate setting. Our small class size will allow us to study and practice the techniques of creative writing with a rigor and intensity impossible in a larger lecture course. You will practice drafting and revision strategies; learn to give and receive constructive feedback; and produce a substantial, revised, and well-polished portfolio of your creative writing. You will also learn professionalization skills including preparing your work both for publication and for further study in the field of creative writing. Our main texts will be each other’s writing, but we will also read and discuss craft essays and published creative works, and become familiar with the several main models of creative writing workshops, their histories, and the communities with which they are associated. You do not need to feel “advanced” in your writing to take this writing-intensive course, but you must have taken at least one course in the Department’s Creative Writing Stream, and you must submit a writing sample for pre-approval by the instructor.

Prerequisite: At least one of the following: ENGE3260 Creative Writing; ENGE3290 Reading and Writing Short Stories; ENGE3360 Special Topics in Creative Writing; OR ENGE3370 Writing Hong Kong.

An intensive study of a major issue in literary studies. Topic(s) will be defined from year to year by the Department of English. Offerings with different subtitles can be taken up for credit, up to a maximum of two times.

Educational Linguistics is the field of study that focuses on the application of linguistics in education. This course aims at engaging students in understanding and examining how knowledge about linguistics and language use can be applied to address various educational issues such as effective language teaching/learning and policy-making in diverse contexts. The major topics of the course include: linguistics in the classroom, multilingual/multiliteracy education, language awareness, translanguaging pedagogies, and language education policy. In addition, the course focuses on how linguistic, racial/ethnic, and cultural diversities can be understood and addressed in education. Students will read and discuss major theories, models, and activities to explore the application of linguistics in education in different world contexts, including Hong Kong.

Over the past few decades, second/foreign language teaching has evolved from a pre-occupation with methods of teaching to a broader perspective of teaching and learning. Within this wider perspective, it is important that teachers not only concern themselves with how they teach, i.e. the methods/approaches and techniques they use, but also develop an understanding of how learners learn, i.e. the processes of learning. Hence, this course particularly focusses on a number of individual difference variables (e.g., personality, motivation, language aptitude, learning styles, and language learning strategies) that affect individuals’ ultimate level of language achievement.

In this capstone course, English majors in their final year of studies will carry out independent research on a topic approved by the Department and supervised by a teacher. It may involve a major essay (15-20 pages) in literature or linguistics, or it may be interdisciplinary. It may also take the form of a project or creative work such as a collection of poetry or short stories. The major paper/project must include critical reflection on the research process, build on undergraduate learning in the major, and make connections with future studies/career plans. The proposal for this course must be submitted to the Department before the term begins. At the end of the semester, all students taking ENGE 4700 will give an oral presentation and be evaluated by a panel of teachers and peers. This is a required course for all four-year students who have joined the Department of English during or after the 2012-2013 academic year.

ENGE4701 is the first in a two-part capstone series for final-year English majors, designed to support students as they embark on independent research projects. The research may involve a major essay in literature or linguistics, or it may be interdisciplinary. It may also take the form of a project or creative work such as a collection of poetry or short stories. The major paper/project must include critical reflection on the research process, build on undergraduate learning in the major, and make connections with future studies/career plans. Under the guidance of a faculty supervisor and with approval from the Department, students will develop comprehensive project plans and participate in peer-led discussions sharing initial proposals, pilot studies, material from developing literature reviews, and/or preliminary drafts of creative work. This preparatory phase emphasizes critical reflection and requires students to integrate their undergraduate learning while establishing connections to future academic or career goals. The course culminates in an assessed project outline, forming the foundation for continued development in ENGE 4702. Completion of ENGE 4701 and 4702 is mandatory for all English majors entering the program in the 2025-2026 academic year or later.

ENGE 4702 is the second course in the capstone series for final-year English majors, building on the preparatory work completed in ENGE 4701. This course guides students through the intermediate and final stages of their independent research projects, under the supervision of a faculty member. The research may involve a major essay in literature or linguistics, or it may be interdisciplinary. It may also take the form of a project or creative work such as a collection of poetry or short stories. The major paper/project must include critical reflection on the research process, build on undergraduate learning in the major, and make connections with future studies/career plans. At the end of the semester, all students enrolled in ENGE 4702 will deliver an oral presentation to an audience of their peers and a panel of instructors, with the evaluation conducted by the instructors. Completion of ENGE 4701 and 4702 is mandatory for all English majors entering the program in the 2025-2026 academic year or later.