Meeting the challenges of English-medium higher education in Hong Kong

This paper considers the needs and challenges of using English as a medium of instruction in Hong Kong universities, where oral Cantonese and written Chinese are the more dominant local languages. It then presents one way of trying to address the needs of the students in these institutions by reporting on the Scaffolding Literacy in Academic and Tertiary Environments (SLATE) project, which was an attempt to adopt a genre-based approach to literacy teaching at a large English-medium public university in Hong Kong. Drawing on work done by the Sydney School genre theorists (Rose & Martin 2012), the SLATE team first profiled the literacy needs of students in particular disciplines. They then used these field-specific understandings of language to develop pedagogical material to scaffold students from non-English speaking background into developing discipline-specific understandings of language. This material was embedded into literacy support for the students within the core units of study of the discipline. In embedding this support, the SLATE team adapted the Teaching Learning Cycle (Rothery 1996) to an online context. In order to do this, they theorised feedback as Negotiated Construction and used it to help students understand some of the features of academic writing. The project described here demonstrates the viability of adopting genre-based approaches to language and literacy teaching in online environments to support the needs of non-English speaking students in institutions where English is the medium of instruction in Hong Kong and elsewhere.