Empowering Students with Timely Academic English Support

Academic success at the undergraduate level rests on several factors. One of these is being able to transfer general academic English skills to discipline-specific writing and speaking assignments. For senior-year students, this challenge is often compounded as they tend to receive less English training just when they are approaching the finishing line and about to write the most daunting piece of writing—their capstone project dissertations.

In light of this, Christy CHAN, Senior Tutor of CityU’s Chan Feng Men-ling Chan Shuk-lin Language Centre (LC) has been at the forefront of co-leading an English Across the Curriculum (EAC) team with experienced English educators from several Hong Kong universities to provide additional English training and resources to senior-year undergraduates.

“With the growth of research areas and trends, English professionals should keep up with the pace of academia by analysing the evolving genres and preparing students for their academic needs. One example is the increasing use of simulation in science research. A lot of final-year science students are expected to self-learn the programming packages, apply them in data analysis and report the results and implications. The challenge often comes in the communication of interdisciplinary knowledge of pure science and computer science in concise academic English,” Chan explains.

Chan notes that students tend to struggle in the area of communication especially if they do not come from strong English-speaking backgrounds. LC and the EAC team are therefore crucial in bridging the gap.

“When we look at the curriculum, English courses are often mandated in freshman and sophomore years but not in senior year when the students need to write their dissertations; there’s a missing gap,” she explains. “Except for very few departments that offer credit-bearing courses on dissertation writing, most of the others would prefer ad hoc English support such as workshops or self-learning resources for their final-year students.”

Being Professional and Visionary
However, filling this gap has not been the only driving force behind Chan’s over two-decade long career—she embraces every opportunity to apply her knowledge of language and linguistics into supporting CityU students.

“At LC, I could try many different things because we’re supporting the entire university’s English, so I have the chance to develop university writing courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and provide language support for dissertation writing, scholarship application, and CityU talents,” she says.

Indeed, Chan started off studying English literature and French, but soon found a new passion in applied linguistics and education during her postgraduate studies in Australia, which eventually carved out her career path in higher education.

“I knew I wanted to teach, but didn’t want to regret going into the teaching field without trying anything else out. I had worked in copyright industry, but soon found that was not my field or calling,” she recalls. That’s when she pursued her two master’s degrees in applied linguistics and English literature before eventually joining CityU.

One of her roles within LC is coordinating English support for final-year science and engineering students. Chan explains that there were few relevant teaching resources back in the old days; so she analysed research articles to identify the structure and language conventions of different academic disciplines. This work ignited a passion in her.

“I feel really interested in research trends and communication, and I feel there is a need to help students,” she adds.

Inter-Institutional Project
Indeed, student support has been the basis of the EAC team’s initiative to enhance university English curriculum. To date, the initiative contains two main features: offering timely, tailor-made and targeted discipline-specific English learning materials, and creating synergy and opportunities for collaborations between English and discipline teachers.

So far, the EAC team’s work has reached over 30 departments, 60 courses, 100 teachers and 10,000 students across four local universities including The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Baptist University and The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

The team won the UGC Collaborative Team Teaching Award 2021-2022, in recognition of its outstanding efforts. This is the fourth time that CLASS faculty members have been honoured since the award’s inception in 2011. The project also won Silver in the prestigious Wharton-QS Reimagine Education Award 2022 under the category of Breakthrough Technology Innovation in Education Award.

With a quiet demeanour, Chan says she feels humbled by the award and that the programme’s success is really down to the collaborative efforts among the partner universities. Having more than 20 years of university teaching experience, all the team members have a good understanding of how to supplement the curriculum by bringing individual bountiful expertise to the table.

“Our team excels in sharing and embracing different ideas, and working with very tight deadlines beyond the call of duty,” she says.

Even during difficult times when face-to-face learning was suspended, the EAC team sprang to innovatively develop a first-of-its-kind interactive mobile app called Capstone Ninja, which is now adopted by universities in Japan, South Korea and China.

The app incorporates English learning modules and bite-sized exercises and quizzes that allow undergraduates to access discipline-specific and customised learning materials in real time to help them complete their capstone projects.

The Road Ahead
Chan is not ready to take a back seat yet. The team is thinking ahead and planning on a new language project.

“With the UGC teaching award grant, we want to research current and new genres for the dissemination of research findings to different audiences and in multi-modal ways”, Chan says. “For example, science and engineering students may report research findings in popular science magazines or showcase it in videos.

“CityU is at the forefront of many new subjects. We have veterinary science, AI in manufacturing, aerospace engineering, and English teaching should keep pace with this evolving world.”