The Hongkong-Beijing-Lancaster Symposium on Research Methodologies for PhD Studies in Linguistics (REMLing) was held between17 and 18 March 2022 via Zoom.
The symposium was organised by the Halliday Centre for Intelligent Applications of Language Studies (HCLS) under the auspices of CLASS at CityU jointly with two other prestigious research centres, the MIIT Centre of AI-based Linguistic Information Processing at Beihang University in Beijing and the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Sciences at Lancaster University in the UK. The event was co-organised by CLASS and the China Association of Corpus Linguistics. This joint symposium was funded by Beijing-Hong Kong Universities Alliance which aims to promote collaboration between Hong Kong and Mainland universities.
The event represented a new initiative on internationally concerted PhD training in general and placed great emphasis on the importance of research methodologies. It tapped into the expertise of not only local and regional linguistic scholars but also involving European academics from CityU, Beihang University, Lancaster University, University of Birmingham, Tilburg University and Vienna University.
In the opening speech, Dean of CLASS Professor Richard M WALKER, noted the great importance that CLASS attaches to research methodologies in PhD research. The CLASS Advanced Methods School, for example, was set up at our College specially for this awareness.
Four keynote talks were delivered by internationally influential scholars from Lancaster University, CityU and Beihang University. Dr Christoph A HAFNER from CityU’s Department of English, who is also a core member of HCLS, gave a keynote talk on qualitative approaches to genre analysis. PhD researchers from CityU, Beihang University, Lancaster University, University of Birmingham, Catholic University of Leuven, Fudan University, Nanyang University of Science and Technology, Xiamen University and Zhejiang Gongshang University, gave presentations at the event. Five of the PhD students from CLASS presented their research and four were voted for Best Presentation Awards.
The symposium was envisaged as a platform for fruitful academic exchange initially in linguistics studies but applicable to other disciplinary areas. It also drew a number of Master of Arts students’ attention that they showed interest in pursuing PhD research in relevant linguistics fields. The event presented insights to the corpus-based approaches to language, broadened and enriched the landscape of linguistic studies.
