Enhancing the Liberal Studies Writing Skills of Non-Chinese Speaking Students through Genre-based Teaching

Abstract

<p>In Hong Kong, Liberal Studies (LS) has been one of the four compulsory subjects in the Senior Secondary curriculum since 2009, and students have to study it for tertiary advancement. Yet it is extremely challenging for non-Chinese speaking (NCS) students to use Chinese as the medium of instruction for Liberal Studies, especially when writing their answers in Chinese in public examination. In response to their learning needs, a research team at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) launched a pilot study about using Genre-based teaching to enhance the writing skills of NCS students. Based on Functional Linguistics (Halliday, 1994) and Genre Theory (Martin, 1999), Mark Shum at HKU had previously identified the genres in major subjects in the secondary curriculum that students are expected to master (Shum, 2006), including LS. Based on the research findings of the genres of Liberal Studies (Shum, 2015), the research team conducted genre teaching in a class of non-Chinese speaking students to enhance their writing skills with the factorial explanation genre, which is one of the important genres of LS. This present paper reports the strategies of the Genre-based pedagogy and the outcomes of the Genre-based teaching by class observation, interviews and text analyses of students’ scripts of pretest and posttest. The results indicated that after genre teaching, the written performance of NCS students had improved in terms of genre identification, sentence patterns and overall construction of the texts. The interviews reflected that the students welcomed this kind of learning and teaching model and they felt more confidence in writing LS essays in Chinese. The findings will have important implications for enhancing Non-Chinese Speaking students’ mastery of Chinese language of other subjects and will offer a new model of content and language integrating learning and teaching for Hong Kong and beyond.</p>