School of Languages and Cultures

2023 Winter Research Program

Engage in a formal research project over the summer semester with the UQ Summer Research Program.

The UQ Winter Research Scholarship Program offers scholarships to students wishing to gain experience working alongside a researcher in a formal research environment in their area of interest at UQ.

Applications have closed

Each project will be offered for a period of four (4) weeks between Monday 26 June – Friday 21 July 2023.

Participation is open to undergraduate (including honours) and master by coursework students who are currently enrolled and will remain at UQ for the entirety of the research program.

Discover more about the Winter Research Program

  1. Memory discourses in letters to women who were executed and disappeared in Chile.
  2. How accurate is professional Mandarin/English interpreters' real-life telephone interpretations?
  3. Translating Testimony from Survivors of Enforced Disappearances in the Algerian War
  4. Multimodal public health communication
  5. Eye tracking in bilingualism research with less-commonly researched languages.
  6. Potential impact of learner background factors on their communication in a second language - Part 2
  1. Language use and story structure: Analysis of stories told by Russian-English bilingual children
  2. Socio-pragmatic understanding of (im)politeness in Korean discourse
  3. ChatGPT for schools – Curating a prompt taxonomy for AI in F-10 Education.
  4. Border-Crossing Australian and Japanese Literature: Literary Exchange as Cultural Diplomacy
  5. Empowering Asian language speakers to become language teachers in Australian schools

4. Multimodal public health communication

Project title: 

Multimodal public health communication 

Hours of engagement & delivery mode

The duration of the project is 4 weeks. Hours of engagement are 36 hours per week. The project can be completed online via Zoom meeting. On-site attendance is not required.

Description:

This project focuses on how health officials in Australia and Taiwan communicated public health information during the COVID-19 pandemic. The primary data of the project are video recordings of COVID-19 press conferences. We will analyze the recordings by attending to details such as how speech and gesture co-occur to create meaning. The project will contribute to the fields of sociolinguistics by showing how social values, beliefs, and attitudes about health are linguistically and multimodally encoded and made accessible to the mass public. The project will also provide media and health professionals with research-based recommendations on how to overcome challenges, repair misunderstandings, and mitigate conflicts in health communication.

Expected outcomes and deliverables:

Scholars will:

  1. gain skills in transcribing video recordings, including speech and gestures;
  2. learn to use different technologies to code and present video data (e.g. InqScribe);
  3. review relevant literature on multimodality and sociolinguistics; and
  4. have the opportunity to co-publish research findings with the primary supervisor

Suitable for:

This project is open to applications from students with a bilingual background in English and Mandarin Chinese only. Students need to have the experience of taking or completing level three Chinese courses at UQ, i.e. CHIN3100, CHIN3110, CHIN3200, or CHIN3210.

Primary Supervisor:

Dr. Sheng-Hsun Lee

Further info:

Please contact Dr. Sheng-Hsun Lee (shengshun.lee@uq.edu.au) if there are question about the project