English

This course examines the science behind the fundamental perceptual processes underlying your sense of vision, including: motion and time perception, luminance and contrast perception, colour perception, geometry perception, space and size perception, and face perception. Visual illusions will be used to highlight key features of these complex perceptual processes.

This course provides a theoretical foundation to the understanding of English language teaching methodology. Through this course, students are expected to adopt and apply an international perspective on English language teaching in the face of increasing immigration and globalization. Selective methods used in teaching English to non-native speakers in Hong Kong and abroad are examined. The course covers the principles governing curriculum design and issues central to the implementation of different English teaching methods and theories; methods and theories appropriate to young and adult learners in second or foreign language contexts. The principles covered in this course form the basis for subsequent courses on English language teaching techniques. Text: D. Larsen-Freeman and M. Anderson, TECHNIQUES AND PRINCIPLES IN LANGUAGE TEACHING. Assessment: group presentation and discussion, English Language Teaching (ELT) Methods' Schemata, theory and methodology reflection paper.

This course reviews the theories and approaches that are typically used to analyze the political economies and political regimes of countries in the global South. The reliability, validity and normative implications of these theories will be evaluated with reference to key case studies - in many cases drawn from the African continent - in order to illustrate or problematize their claims. Though this is a political science course, our study of the politics of the South will be informed by debates that span a number of disciplines, including history, economics, law, anthropology and sociology.

Cultural psychology examines how our psychology (perception, emotion, judgment, attitudes, personality, etc.) and our culture (the distribution of values, practices, beliefs, institutions, and human-made physical environments within which each of us uniquely develops) make one another up. Some of the topics explored in this course include: how language influences how we think or what we can think about; the extent to which are our emotions shared across the species and the extent to which they depend on culture; mental disorders such as PTSD, depression, ADHD, or schizophrenia, which are more highly diagnosed in the U.S. than in other countries around the world; the role culture might play in mental health and in its diagnosis, and in the conception of mental disorders themselves. A common tension throughout this class is the extent to which we can—or should— generalize about psychology across the human species. Arguably, unlike any other species in earth's history, humans come into the world ill-prepared to survive in any particular physical environment; yet, thanks in large part to social and cultural systems, we are able to adapt across an extreme range of habitats. The basic question to examine here is: To what extent do people in all cultures share the same psychology and to what extent does our psychology differ along with our distinct cultures?