About Andy Chin
I joined HKIEd as an Assistant Professor in an Institute-level research Centre in 2010. In 2012, I became a faculty member of the Department of Linguistics and Modern Language Studies in the Faculty of Humanities.
My teaching
Trained as a linguist, my teaching mainly focuses on courses related to language and linguistics. In particular, I am interested in how language is actually used for communication, and also how it evolves and develops over time and across space. My research focus and teaching areas generally follow this line of interest.
So far, I have (co-)taught 8 different courses at both undergraduate and post-graduate levels: Introduction to Linguistics, Spoken and Written Discourse, English as a Lingua Franca in Asia, Introduction to Sociolinguistics, Chinese Rhetoric, Language and Society, Structure of Chinese, Overseas Chinese Studies.
All these courses require a critical analysis and reflection on the use of language(s) in different social and cultural contexts.
Samples of course outlines
My Research
I have been actively participating in research activities including research grant proposal submission, and dissemination of research outputs. They are all related to Knowledge Transfer, one of the Institute’s strategic areas.
I was invited to give presentations on Knowledge Transfer activities, guest lectures to postgraduate students on research methodology and research proposal writing, and sharing sessions on developing grant proposals.
In 2013, I was awarded the HKIEd President's Award for Outstanding Performance in Research - Early Career Research Excellence Award.
RTHK Interviews
During January and November 2014, I have contributed 41 epsisodes of 5-minute sharing at RTHK’s 晨光第一線 every Friday morning. The theme of the sharing is Language, Society and Culture. The list of the interviews can be found in the following webpage [LINK]
My research on Cantonese
In the past few years, I have been working on the development of a corpus of Cantonese, a Chinese dialect which is spoken as the usual home language by nearly 90% of the Hong Kong's population (based on the 2011 census data).
The corpus is unique in terms of its language data, when compared with other Cantonese corpora previously constructed by other scholars. Our data is drawn from the dialgoues spoken in the Cantonese old movies which are usually called 粵語長片. We have transcribed the dialogues of 50 such movies produced between 1950 and 1970.
The aim of building such a corpus with this special type of language data is not only for studying the dialect concerned, but also its development over the past six decades. This project has been seen as an attempt to preserve Cantonese as well as its associated cultures. It will not only advance our understanding of the development of Cantonese, but also on the inter-relationship between language, society and culture.
Data of 14 movies are now available for search at 《香港二十世紀中期粵語語料庫》(URL: http://corpus.ied.edu.hk/hkcc/)
I was interviewed by the media such as Cable TV and Singtao News on this project.