Prof. Barry Lee Reynolds chaired the 2nd annual Faculty of Education Postgraduate Research Symposium held at the University of Macau on 23 April 2022. The symposium provided opportunities for Faculty of Education postgraduate students at the master’s and doctorate levels to use English to practice giving conference papers and poster presentations in a friendly environment. The 2022 symposium theme was “New Trends in Educational Research.”
Several ALLL members were in attendance or assisted with the symposium. Cindy, Evelyn, and Ann assisted with the registration. Jiaxuan assisted with the symposium booklet and Jessie assisted with the website updates. Connie and Janis assisted with photography. Two lab members presented their research in the poster section. Xiaofang (Jessie) Zhang, a PhD student, presented a poster titled “A mixed-methods investigation of the effectiveness and perceptions of learning English collocations using the keyword method and the rote learning method” and Xiaoyan (Crystal) Ma, a Master of Philosophy Student, presented a poster titled “The Effect of Reading Purpose on Incidental Acquisition and Retention of Vocabulary from Reading.”
In addition to a keynote speech given by Prof. Jun Liu, Rector of City University of Macau, on “10 Things Graduate Students Should Avoid in Doing Research”, there were 4 postgraduate paper presentations and 7 postgraduate poster presentations. The student presentations covered state of the art research in first language reading, second language vocabulary, teacher autonomy, online instruction, problem-solving competence, romantic relationship quality, among others. Lihua Tan won the best paper presentation award and Xiaofang (Jessie) Zhang won the best poster presentation award.