The effectiveness of using ‘Reading to Learn’ pedagogy in enhancing the ability of non-Chinese speaking students in writing complaint letter

Abstract

This research aims to study the effectiveness of using Reading to Learn pedagogy in enhancing the writing ability of non-Chinese-speaking students in practical writing through adopting Reading to Learn in teaching. The subject of this research is a group of 20 secondary 2-3 non-Chinese-speaking students from local secondary schools. The subjects are currently participating in the Student Support Programme (SSP) co-organised by the Education Bureau and the Centre for Advancement of Chinese Language Education and Research of the University of Hong Kong. During the research, the team adopted the Reading to Learn pedagogy in the three parts of teaching. The first part was Preparing for Reading and Detailed Reading, aiming to introduce the stages and wordings of a complaint letter through reading model text; the second part featured the usage of intensive strategies to reinforce students’ skills of writing a complaint letter; the third part was on summarising the writing criteria of complaint letter and Joint Construction to guide students to write a complaint letter through teacher and student interaction. The research methodology includes class observations, interviews and text analyses of pre-test and post-test. The preliminary results show that the Reading to Learn pedagogy has obvious effect in enhancing the ability of students in writing a complaint letter practically.