President's Awards

Individual Award

Dr MA Qing
馬清博士
Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics and Modern Language Studies

Dr Angel MA is an expert in language technology, experimenter of corpus technology in teaching as well as a passionate English teacher trainer. Her teaching philosophy is focused on creating an interactive, technology-enhanced learning environment to help students become independent learners. She created an inductive, data-driven and interactive learning (IDII) framework, which is able to help students to become independent learners. This framework is applicable to the teaching of many subjects.

Informed by her IDII framework, Dr Ma established an innovative approach – a corpus-based language pedagogy (CBLP), which has been disseminated to 600 students and 1,000 English teachers in 300 universities and schools in Hong Kong, mainland China and internationally in the past four years. In Hong Kong and elsewhere, traditional language pedagogy relies on textbooks, dictionaries and deductive learning, resulting in passive, teacher-dependent learners. By contrast, Dr Ma’s CBLP motivates students to actively study authentic language and discover language rules by themselves via inductive, data-driven, and interactive learning, thus empowering them to become independent learners.

Dr Ma believes that knowledge is co-constructed via interaction and that students often learn better when they collaborate with one another. Collaborative learning helps bridge the gap between what learners can and cannot do, contributing to independent learning. To engage students in learning, she created the “3Ins+C” model, in which interaction proceeds through four stages: individual, intra-group, inter-group and community. This model can be adopted in both classroom and online teaching for various courses and subjects, including teaching CBLP.

In addition to helping student teachers develop CBLP, Dr Ma has disseminated CBLP to the broader professional English teacher community outside EdUHK. She has conducted or organised 35 workshops for student teachers and English teachers in Hong Kong and beyond. Her CBLP has reached beyond the Greater Bay Area to over 16 countries (including Korea, Japan, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, India, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Sweden, Russia, UK, USA, Mexico and Saudi Arabia).

Her CBLP and expertise in language technology has been recognised locally and internationally, and Dr Ma has received two international awards:

• a Silver Medal at the 47th International Exhibition of Inventions, 2019 (Geneva, Switzerland), and