The effectiveness of using ‘Reading to Learn, Learning to Write’ pedagogy in teaching Chinese to non-Chinese speaking students in Hong Kong: Based on the text analysis of students' writing

Abstract

This paper examines the effectiveness of “Reading to Learn, Learning to Write, R2L” pedagogy (Rose, 2012) in teaching Chinese to non-Chinese speaking students in Hong Kong. The R2L pedagogy is applied to teach these students to read and write texts of different genres in a junior secondary Chinese after school class for a year. Students were asked to write a composition before and after each genre teaching cycle respectively. During the teaching cycle the teachers adopted the procedure from preparing for reading, detailed reading, joint re-writing, sentence-making, to joint construction in order to provide sufficient scaffolding to the students before they write their own composition. This paper will choose the writings from students representing the low, medium and high achievers respectively. Their pre-test and post-test writings will be analyzed using Reading to Learn assessment criteria and number of words in their writings. One of the students was selected to be the case of focus since the student received Chinese teaching solely in lessons provided by the research team. The student’s writings were analyzed with Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday, 1994, 2004) framework on the aspect of transitivity, modality, cohesion, etc. Besides, semi-structured interviews will be conducted to understand the teachers and students on their opinion of this pedagogy. A preliminary observation of the pre-test and post-test writings suggests that after the teaching, students can write much longer with better text organization following the schematic structure illustrated in the reading texts. The case of focus also shows a continuous improvement in different aspects of analysis. It is hoped that the findings can provide information to improve the teaching of Chinese as a second language for non-Chinese speaking students in Hong Kong.