Director

Dr. TONG, Xiuli Shelley

 

Professor

Human Communication, Learning, and Development
Faculty of Education

The University of Hong Kong


Degree:
 Ph.D., Chinese University of Hong Kong (2008)
Email: xltong@hku.hk
Phone: +852 2241 5981


Correspondence Address:
Room 804B, Meng Wah Complex,
The University of Hong Kong,
Pokfulam, Hong Kong


Recent Honors and Awards:

  • HKU Faculty Knowledge Exchange Award (2024)
  • HKU Faculty of Education Outstanding Researcher Award (2021)
  • HKU Faculty of Education Research Output Prize (2021)
  • RGC Research Fellow Award (2021)
  • Fulbright Senior Research Scholar Award (2019)
  • HKU Research Output Prize (2017)
  • HKU Faculty of Education Research Output Prize (2017)
  • HKU Faculty of Education Outstanding Young Researcher Award (2016)
  • HKU Faculty of Education Early Career Research Output Award (2016)
  • HKU Overseas Fellowship Award (2015)
  • National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship (2011)

 

Profile

Prof. Shelley Xiuli Tong’s Ph.D. and postdoctoral work explored the mechanisms of word reading and reading comprehension development and difficulties in Chinese and English. Expanding these areas through the unification of speech perception, language learning, and biliteracy acquisition, her early work resulted in the development of a new interdisciplinary research program to understand how bilingual children crack suprasegmental speech and orthographic codes to formulate speech-print associations in the process of becoming biliterate.

 

Her more recent work has focused on the following research topics:

(1) Neural mechanisms of human cognition, reading, and social-emotions
(2) Classification and diagnosis of special educational needs (SEN)
(3) Understanding the strengths and difficulties of children with SEN and developing multi-modal clinical and educational practices for children with and without SEN
(4) Statistical learning in children and adults with and without SEN
(5) Musicianship and tone language expertise
(6) Prosodic reading and reading comprehension development


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