Ni Eng Lim

I am currently an Assistant Professor in the Division of Chinese at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), School of Humanities & Social Sciences. My academic interests lie in the interactional and discourse-functional analysis of various communicative practices of Mandarin Chinese. The framework with which I work in includes Conversation Analysis (CA), Multi-Modal Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics. My on-going research focuses on the interactional, socio-cultural and cognitive operations at work in normal everyday Mandarin Chinese talk-in-interaction, as well as in multilingual institutional contexts. Through interaction analysis of video and audio recordings of actual communicative events, investigating commonplace social action/expression and their discourse-pragmatic functions, cognitive phenomenon such as theory of mind and intersubjectivity can be empirically and discursively explicated. I am also interested in the pedagogical aspects of my research, on how to successfully integrate discourse-pragmatic findings into a Mandarin Chinese Teaching curriculum. As insights into the language-specific resources available for interactional accomplishments are gained, pedagogical methodologies for teaching spoken Mandarin Chinese can be further refined.

Coming from the Singaporean education system that emphasizes bilingualism, I am equally fluent in English and Mandarin Chinese as a first language. I also speak Hokkien, a “dialect (it’s really another language altogether since the phonological structure and grammar is totally different)” of Chinese. After graduating with a B.A. (Hons) from the National University of Singapore (NUS) in the Department of Chinese Studies, I continued with a M.A. (by research) in the same department, pursuing studies in grammaticalization and language typology. Before pursuing my doctoral studies at UCLA, I worked as a Mandarin Chinese instructor for 4 years, one year at Raffles Girls’ School and three years at Hwa Chong Institution. My Ph.D. studies at UCLA focuses mainly on Conversation Analysis, under the tutelage of Prof. Emanuel A. Schegloff and Prof. John Heritage, Discourse Analysis under Prof. Charles Goodwin, as well as Mandarin discourse-pragmatics and Corpus Linguistic under Prof. Hongyin Tao.

Academic Qualifications:

• 2014 Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles, California (UCLA).
• 2005 Masters of Arts (by Research), Department of Chinese Studies, NUS, Singapore.
• 2001 Bachelor of Arts (Hons.), Department of Chinese Studies, NUS, Singapore.

HONORS, AWARDS AND GRANTS

• (2015 – 2017) Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Start-Up Grant (SUG), Communicative Difficulties in Healthcare settings: Talk and Interaction with Chinese-speaking Elderly Patients.
• (2014 – 2015) CLASS Postdoctoral Fellowship, Nanyang Technological University (NTU)
• (2012 – 2013) UCLA University Fellowship, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
• 2012 – Sandra A. Thompson Best Student Paper Award for the Second International Symposium on Chinese Language and Discourse (ISCLD-2), Singapore.
• (2009 – 2010) Graduate Fellowship of the UCLA Center of Chinese Studies, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
• (2007 – 2008) UCLA Dean’s Fellowship, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
• (2007) Tan Kah Kee Foundation Postgraduate Scholarship
• (2001 – 2003) NUS Research Scholarship, National University of Singapore (NUS)
• (2000 – 2001) Honors Program, National University of Singapore (NUS)
• (1997 – 2000) Dean’s List Awards for 4 consecutive semesters, National University of Singapore (NUS)
• (1998 – 2001) MOE Teaching Award, Ministry of Education, Singapore