School of Languages and Cultures

Summer Research Program - 2022/23 Projects

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

The UQ Summer 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 for the 2022/2023 Summer Research Program have now CLOSED.

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 Summer Research Program

Applications have closed

Available 2022-23 Projects

  1. Communicating Public Health: Stories in the Time of COVID-19
  2. Brisbane’s voices: A pragmatic analysis of conversations in Spanish and Russian communities
  3. Mapping experiences of torture during Aceh’s separatist war
  4. Potential impact of learner background factors on their second language communication
  1. Peer Written Corrective Feedback (WCF) in Academic English MOOCs
  2. Socio-pragmatic understanding of (im)politeness in spoken Korean discourse
  3. Other Projects

1. Communicating Public Health: Stories in the Time of COVID-19

Project title: 

Communicating Public Health: Stories in the Time of COVID-19

Project duration, hours of engagement & delivery mode

  • 10 weeks
  • 30 hours per week
  • The project can be completed online via Zoom meeting. On-site attendance is not required.

Description:

This project will provide a detailed analysis of the use of pandemic narratives in public health communication in Australia and Taiwan during the COVID-19 pandemic. The primary data of the project are video recordings of the Australian and Taiwanese governments’ press conferences about COVID-19. We will analyze the data by using a cross-disciplinary approach that combines narrative and multimodal discourse analyses in order to show the communicative strategies and multimodal resources used in composing narratives about the COVID-19 pandemic. The project will contribute to the fields of sociolinguistics by showing how social values, beliefs, and attitudes about health are linguistically and multimodally encoded in the narratives of public health communication. The project will also give media and health professionals 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 and Final Cut Pro);

  3. review relevant literature on narratives, multimodality, and sociolinguistics;

  4. present their findings at a research seminar at School of Languages and Cultures;

  5. 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