I’m a current PhD student at Shanghai Jiao Tong University using corpus-based discourse analysis to analyse public online health communities. From October 2019 to October 2020, I had the great pleasure to pursue my study at the University of Sydney as a visiting PhD student under the supervision of Professor Monika Bednarek, Director of the Sydney Corpus Lab. My visit was enabled through the competitive China Scholarship Council Research Programs Visiting Scholarship, which supports postgraduate students in China to undertake research at the University of Sydney. What motivated me to apply for this scholarship was Monika’s expertise in corpus linguistics and the supportive learning atmosphere of the Lab for building capacity in corpus linguistics. My PhD thesis project uses corpus-linguistics to investigate how participants perform and negotiate illness identities in computer-mediated medical discourse. The corpus linguistic aspects of my research align exactly with Monika’s expertise. Additionally, the Lab events could provide me with cutting-edge knowledge in the corpus linguistics field shared by CL professionals. Most importantly, I could learn many useful and practical corpus processing techniques, which was sure to assist my thesis project.

My experience here was academically productive, even given the constraints imposed by Covid-19 on campus. Monika and I would meet regularly both face-to-face and virtually (due to Covid-19), to discuss my thesis and provide feedback and suggestions on my research. With the help of this supervision, I was able to complete the corpus design and construction and finalise the methods and analytical frameworks for my thesis (including UAM Corpus Tool, AntConc by Laurence Anthony, n-grams analysis, etc). By the middle of my visit, I had completed my thesis’s literature review, theoretical framework, and data and methodology. We then focused our supervision sessions on working on a sole-authored journal article based on my initial corpus linguistic investigations of public online health communities (now under review with a major international journal). During my stay, Monika also kindly introduced various useful academic activities to me so that I was able to attend multiple seminars with other researchers every week, for example, the PhD seminar (organized by Georgia), the SFL webinar (by Vihn), the HDR PPS seminar (by Lila), and the HDR corpus linguistics group meeting (by Mel) with Monika’s PhD students. All these academic events have tremendously broadened my academic horizons and enriched my academic life here.

Despite it not being a traditional campus experience because of the coronavirus, the Lab experience was incredibly rewarding and unforgettable for me, and I would like to thank Monika for this wonderful opportunity and for her kindness, hospitality and encouragement throughout the visit. I am also grateful for all the resources I have received during my stay. Finally, I would like to thank the China Scholarship Council and the Sydney of University Visiting Research Program for funding this great opportunity. It will certainly remain a very memorable experience in my academic career.