Innovating Instruction: English in the Discipline at the University of Hong Kong

Abstract

The 2012 educational reforms in Hong Kong are a unique curriculum innovation, dramatically increasing Hong Kong’s tertiary intake and offering opportunities for universities to move to a less specialized and more holistic student-oriented approach to undergraduate education. For those of us responsible for English language provision it also presents considerable challenges and raises some key questions about the kind of English that we should be teaching. At the University of Hong Kong (HKU) 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 recognizes 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 paper I outline what this means in practice and argue for a more context-sensitive approach to English provision, based on closer cooperation with academic disciplines and research-informed course design.