Erik the Linguist

27/04/2026

[Seminar talk] What can interview data tell us that a Likert scale cannot?

I spoke recently at the CPCECPR Seminar on making sense of qualitative interview data. The core question I kept returning to: if we want to understand how and why students or teachers experience what they do, do our methods actually match that ambition?

Drawing on three of my own studies — on EAP teacher identity, digital storytelling service-learning, and generative AI in writing — I shared:

1. Why interpretivist researchers treat data as meaning-making, not measurement
2. How interview protocol design must stay answerable to your research questions
3. What "trustworthiness" means in practice: member checking, triangulation, positionality
4. Why coding interview data is both bottom-up (open coding) and theory-driven (a priori coding)

I also left a question I can't fully answer yet: when AI can code transcripts and write up findings, what is the researcher's distinctive contribution?

My tentative answer, though cliché: it's the enjoyment of the chats. The enjoyment of discovering new insights from the chats -- and WE FIGURE THEM OUT.

Thanks to the LTQC and CPCECPR teams for the invitation.

What is your take — what does the human researcher do that AI cannot, in qualitative work?

(From the talk I gave at CPR Ignite: Student/Staff Research Seminar Series on 27 April 2026. The content is mine, polished into this post with Perplexity AI.) When students come to us for advice on…

02/05/2023

Don't miss this great seminar this Friday if you're interested in knowing whether and how GenAI can facilitate scholarly writing, and academic writing in general (both students and academicians). My good colleague Dr Wayne Wong (University of Sheffield) will share ChatGPT's performance and limitations in dealing with topic related to film studies, aside from the pedagogical implications for teaching disciplinary writing with GenAI.

Register with this link: https://bit.ly/cpce-lc-sem-wayne

See you at the seminar!

Full abstract of the talk:
ChatGPT: Potentials and Limitations of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on Academic Writing

This paper argues that ChatGPT (Generative Pre-training Transformer), an artificial intelligence (AI) writing tool, has the potential to revolutionise academic writing. Released in December 2022, ChatGPT is a language model developed by OpenAI that can understand and respond to natural language inputs. It can generate human-like text and can be used for a variety of natural language processing tasks, including conversation, text paraphrasing, and summarization. For a long time, arts and humanities scholars have excelled in expressing ideas through written language. The advent of technological tools, including word processing software, the Internet, and interactive archives and databases, has made the research process easier for us as creative individuals. Despite the availability of these tools, writing remains a uniquely human capacity. However, the introduction of ChatGPT challenges this notion by allowing machines to participate in the research and writing process, presenting both a crisis and new opportunities for arts and humanities scholars. This article adopts a tripartite approach to evaluating ChatGPT's capabilities, examining 1) what it can perform, 2) what it cannot perform, and 3) what it has the potential to perform. As a film scholar, the author will pose questions to ChatGPT and ask it to generate paragraphs related to the study of Chinese martial arts cinema. The extent to which ChatGPT can accurately summarise existing scholarship, imitate different writing styles, and incorporate credible sources in its writing will be assessed. The quality of the content will be evaluated from the perspective of a martial arts film scholar, thus highlighting its limitations. Finally, the author will test ChatGPT's learning potential by teaching it various film theories in the field and determining its ability to apply them to its writing. The results of this study will be of significant importance to scholars not only in Chinese cinema and media studies but also in the arts and humanities in general. While ChatGPT creates new challenges such as AI plagiarism, it also drives academia to evolve and adapt, exploring the possibility of developing a symbiotic relationship with AI in knowledge creation.

30/04/2023

Spinning Raincatcher Issue 3, April 2023 | Curtain Call

I share my thoughts on wrapping up the semester and hosting seminars on teaching professional development these two weeks, and then reflect on the use of technology in the classroom and how it can be effective in engaging students, but also emphasize the importance of being sensitive to student needs and interests.

I also share two articles on the benefits of reading fiction for improving empathy and language skills, as well as a tool called Cognosys that generates prompts for researching topics.

I wrap up my newsletter with a tribute to a Hong Kong indie group led by the late Joshua Wong, performing wonderful tracks, including the energy- and emotion-packed "Curtain Call".

Spinning Raincatcher | Issue 2, April 2023 -- The end of the semester means a quick switch in gear to engage myself in research, writing and preparing materials.

27/04/2023

[TODAY] My colleague and I are sharing invaluable insights from language lecturers, who host open classes in a languages and communication division at a tertiary college, with regard to the use of educational technology across delivery modes.

These outstanding teachers (some of them are award-winning teachers) remind us of what "technology" in the classroom really means, if not surprise you with their strategies to engage students in learning activities.

The seminar is a hybrid one, to start at 15:00 (GMT+8); if you cannot make it to our campus, you may use this link to access our seminar directly: https://lnkd.in/g7_urJQt

See you soon!

24/04/2023

Join us for an insightful seminar with Dr Lianjiang George Jiang, Assistant Professor in English Language Education at The University of Hong Kong, on 4 May 2023 (Thursday), 3-4:30 p.m., via Zoom and at PolyU West Kowloon Campus.

In this seminar, he will discuss recent developments in AI-enabled writing tools and their instructional use in second-language writing classroom settings.

Drawing on sociocultural and social semiotic perspectives, Dr Jiang will investigate methods for second language writing teachers to facilitate the complex interactions among second language learner writers, AI-powered writing tools, and educational settings.

Register via this link: https://bit.ly/cpr-george

Don't miss this opportunity to learn from a leading expert in the field!

03/04/2023

Spinning Raincatcher | Issue 1, April 2023
Every two weeks I share my teaching/research thoughts, recent readings, gadgets/ apps I use, and idea dumps in my newsletter. This one timely wraps up the eventful Q1 of 2023: there are definitely more that I should look forward to in the upcoming months!



https://erikpiece.substack.com/p/everything-is-in-place

Photo by Daniele Franchi on Unsplash

27/03/2023

This Substack article is my first long teaching-and-learning blog I wrote in a while. Two weeks ago, my newsletter mentioned that I ran a small "storytelling" session with a group of students, using image cue cards generated by Stable Diffusion Playground. In this long article, I detailed the process of preparing the materials, including how to generate more image prompts for SD with ChatGPT, the planning of the session, and some observations I gained from the students' reflections. I benefitted a lot from the process.

Through this experience, I want to emphasise that fellow teachers shouldn't feel any sense of "guilt" when using generative AI for teaching, for this is not "laziness" or "cutting corners"; instead, when some tasks are delegated to different tools, we can eventually be freed up for things that are really creative and empathetic: designing innovative pedagogies, understanding students, interacting with them, etc.

Have a creative week ahead!

A Look at How Storytelling with ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion Playground is Enhancing the Learning Experience

25/03/2023

About to drop my first long article for a while... It'll be live on Sunday at 9 am (HKT). Have a great weekend, and goodnight, fellow Raincatchers!

Catching the rain: my teaching and research ideas, books and articles I read, songs I listen to, and whatever is collected in the raincatcher. Click to read Spinning Raincatcher, by Eric Cheung, a Substack publication. Launched a month ago.

19/03/2023

A very eventful fortnight that I find it impossible not to share a few general thoughts: generative AI, tools using AI, alongside other thoughts after going to a music festival and a poetry reading event.

Sincerely inviting you to read and subscribe to my newsletter, to receive biweekly digests recording my teaching and research ideas, readings and techs I'm interested in, a few questions, etc. :)

Especially in the age of artificial intelligence. These two weeks have been really eventful. At the beginning of March, Hong Kong lifted its mask mandate, and I finally was able to attend our first mask-free outdoor music festival. In-person events are becoming more frequent — this month I’m goi...

15/02/2023

Join us on February 28th at 3:00 p.m. for our exciting seminar titled “Communicating ‘shared value’: a social semiotic analysis of ESG discourse on social media” presented by Dr Ester Nervino (Assistant Professor of the Department of English and Communication and Department of Marketing, City University of Hong Kong).

This is one of the first interdisciplinary research seminars I organise for my Division of Languages and Communication at CPCE PolyU. Don't miss out!



Abstract

For decades, institutions, businesses, and individuals have engaged in discourse regarding their commitment to building a better world. While institutions have struggled to agree on common standards and regulations, businesses have shifted their corporate discourse to focus on environmental, social, and governance themes (ESG), which reflect their efforts to preserve the planet (E), generate positive societal impact (S), and operate in compliance with economic policies (G). This new rhetoric is the result of corporate peer pressure, increased activism and consumer engagement on social media, and growing risks for reputational damage and financial impacts on corporations. Among all business sectors, luxury has historically been associated with qualities such as overconsumption and social stratification that do not naturally align with sustainability (Thurlow & Jaworski, 2017; Veblen, 1957), however, it has been integrating ESG factors into corporate discourse. This study is concerned with the semiotic construction of meanings related to the renegotiation of the oxymoronic concept of ‘sustainable luxury’ (Wells et al. 2021). This study adopts a social semiotic approach to analyse Instagram posts shared by luxury brands in 2019, 2020 and 2021 (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001; Nervino, 2018). Preliminary findings show how the discourse shared on Instagram constructs environmental, social, and governance claims by deploying a diversified set of semiotic resources to articulate a call for collective action and play the role of a catalyst for certain causes. In this vein, brands discursively construct an alignment between their financial ambitions and long-term value creation for society to advocate, influence, and drive the sustainability discourse.