Re-imagining literacy: English in Hong Kong’s new university curriculum

Abstract

In September 2012, Hong Kong’s universities launched a 4-year undergraduate curriculum to replace the existing 3-year system, reducing the secondary school experience by 1 year and refocusing on a more holistic student-oriented approach to undergraduate education. A major element of the new curriculum is the provision of English in this new context, raising some key questions about the kind of English that we should be teaching. At the University of Hong Kong (HKU), the territory’s premier institute of higher learning, teachers in the Centre for Applied English Studies have chosen to completely rethink how they understand and deliver their courses. Here, students will be required to take 12 credits of English, double the current number, and half of these must be in the form of ‘English in the Discipline’. This recognises that because the conventions of academic communication differ considerably across disciplines, identifying the particular language features, discourse practices, and communicative skills of target groups becomes central to teaching English in universities. In this chapter, I outline what this means in practice and how the centre has gone about creating a more context-sensitive approach to English provision, based on closer cooperation with academic disciplines and research-informed course design.