Enhancing the Liberal Studies Writing Skills of Non-Chinese Speaking Students Through Genre-Based Teaching

In Hong Kong, Liberal Studies (LS) was one of the four compulsory subjects in the Senior Secondary curriculum from 2009, and students had 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, M. A. K. An introduction to functional grammar (2nd ed.). Edward Arnold, 1994) and Genre theory (Martin, J. R. Mentoring semogenesis: ‘Genre-based’ literacy pedagogy. In F. Christie (Ed.), Pedagogy and the shaping of consciousness: Linguistic and social processes (pp. 123–155). Continuum, 1999), Mark Shum at HKU had previously identified the genres in major subjects in the secondary curriculum that students are expected to master (Shum, M. S. K., Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 29:1–22, 2006), including LS. Based on the research findings of the genres of Liberal Studies (Shum, M. S. K., Subject specific genres of liberal studies and the skills of expression. Hong Kong Educational Publishing Company, 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 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 was 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 offer a new model of content and language integrating learning and teaching for Hong Kong and beyond.