Teachers' Lift

Now, Darren Harbutt is not new to the teachers‘ Lift. Back in 2020, he featured in one of our early episodes when HKU hosts, Phil Smythe and Aditi Jhaveri, where he shared his expertise on blended learning with a focus on e-assessment. Now it’s the turn of Dawn Gillis and Eric Tindall asking the questions, as we take a look in the rear view mirror of the last two years and ask

Bilingualism in Hong Kong is often the product of learning English as a second language (L2) after Cantonese has been acquired as the first language (L1). Issues of code-switching (speakers alternating between two or more languages), interference (use of elements of one language while speaking or writing another) and translanguaging (with an emphasis on the interconnectedness of la

Now in this latest episode from the Teachers’ Lift, we hear from Dave Gatrell, pedagogical consultant at PolyU's Educational Development Centre. Hosts, Dawn Gillis and Eric Tindall quiz Dave about his phd studies, and how video annotation software can help boost the communication skills learners for today's academic environment. Listeners keen to spice up their own classes can pi

In this episode, our hosts Colin Tait and Levi Lam are chatting with Dr. Lisa Cheung about the work she has done in developing an English in the Discipline (ED) Course at the Centre for Applied English Studies at HKU. Lisa reflects on her long experience of engaging with colleagues in the Faculty of Dentistry to create a course that can best serve the disciplinary communication nee

From Nina Simone to Bowie, the Velvet Underground to the Rolling Stones, taking in Cairo and Beijing along the way, this wide-ranging conversation with the PolyU’s former Director of the English Language Centre, Bruce Morrison, looks back at his career and his thoughts on students teachers. Podcast hosts Dawn Gillis and Eric Tindall ask the questions (sometimes) and get a musical

What’s the role of self-access language learning centres in today's online world? Do they still have a place? Can they be re-imagined? In this episode of Teachers’ Lift, the tables are turned on host Eric Tindall as he is interviewed by Dawn Gillis and Jessica Xia from PolyU about how the ELC’s Centre for Independent Language Learning is changing with the times.

We’re always looking for ways to make our students more engaged and make teaching more engaging for us – one possibility is to incorporate design-based learning. But first, we need to know what this is, its benefits, its challenges, and how this can be applied to the courses that we teach in our respective centers. Listen to this episode with Mike Ladao to get some of these ans

Why do Hong Kong university students learn German? What makes them interested in the German language and culture? And how do teachers build on students’ skills acquired while learning a first and second language to help them learn a new foreign language? Tune into this episode with Tonja Fung to know.

As HKU prepared to return to face-to-face teaching and learning this semester after almost 2 years of being online, Dr. Alvin Wong from the Department of Comparative Literature and Dr. Brenda Allegre from Gender studies, gauge the mood of their students and talk about their own feelings and experiences after being back on campus.

In this episode Levi Lam interviews Dr. Melinda Whong, Director of the Centre for Language Education at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, about two major initiatives she's spearheaded during her tenure- scholarship and competency-based assessment frameworks.