Open Events

Inter-university Symposium on English Across the Curriculum

A one-day symposium entitled “Inter-university Symposium on English Across the Curriculum” was co-organised by the 4 participating institutions (i.e. PolyU, CUHK, CityU and HKUST), and was held in December 2014 in CUHK. Two keynote speakers, Professor Oliver Meyer (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany) and Ms Sally Mitchell (Queen Mary University of London, UK), were invited to talk about the practices in their respective countries. Three discipline academics from local institutions: Professor Shekhar Kumta (CUHK), Professor Jason Choi (PolyU) and Dr Prakash Metaparti (PolyU), shared their English across the Curriculum views and experience with participants.

Over a hundred participants from 8 universities/higher institutions joined this event (CUHK, PolyU, CityU, HKUST, HKBU, LU, IEd and Technological and Higher Education Institute). The event successfully attracted participants from within the tertiary sector and from an outside institution. Participants were not solely English teachers, but also discipline staff who would like to find out more about implementing EAC in their own subject. A panel discussion was held in the afternoon and participants shared views and current practices in their subjects.

International Conference on English Across the Curriculum 2015

In the post-survey of the two-day conference organised as part of this project entitled “International Conference on English Across the Curriculum 2015”, more than 80% of the respondents (total=54) agreed that the conference had contributed to their professional development. An average of over 73% of respondents also indicated that they had learned “a lot” from the plenary presentations given by Professor Zawacki, Dr Wingate and Professor Glaser).

Workshop on Developing Effective Writing Assignments: A ‘Backwards-by-Design’ Approach

Professor Terry Myers Zawacki, one of the conference keynote speakers, facilitated a workshop entitled “Developing Effective Writing Assignments: A ‘Backwards-by-Design’ Approach” on 16 December 2015 in PolyU. 17 participants from 3 local institutions attended Professor Myers Zawacki’s workshop on 16 December 2015, 6 of whom were discipline academics and 11 were English language teachers.

Others

A cross-institutional seminar entitled “English across the curriculum: An exploratory study of three types of university English courses” was delivered on 25 January 2016 in HKBU.

Internal Events

Various workshops were offered for staff from all disciplines across the universities. Topics included:

• The Use of Concordancer and Collocations in Reserach Writing
• Tense and Voice in Describing and Discussing Research Findings
• English Across the Curriculum: Writing Effective Assignment Questions, Assessing Language in Student Presentations and Improving Students' English Use in Assignments
• Improving Word Choice in Academic Writing - Tools You Need
• Developing Effective Writing Assignments: A "Backward-by-Design" Approach
• Writing an SOP (standard operation procedure)
• English Across the Curriulum: An Exploratory Study of Three Types of University English Courses

Other than workshops, training and sharing sessions were offered to English language teachers on practices and experiences of developing English across the Curriculum with discipline academics.

The professional development workshops were well attended by over 200 staff members from the four participating universities.  At the end of professional development workshops conducted by the project team, participants were invited to complete an anonymous feedback questionnaire, and were asked to rate the workshops on a 5-point scale (5=excellent and 1=poor). The overall rating on both the learning experience and the usefulness of the workshops were high, at 4.54 and 4.64 respectively.

Numerous participants wrote in the open-ended section of the feedback survey that they would like more workshops to be conducted on a number of topics, including:

• How to avoid plagiarism
• Writing in science disciplines
• Assessing different discipline-specific subject assessment tasks
• How to write MC questions
• Skills and tips of proofreading and editing in the writing process
• How to grade the student in writing
• More workshops about speaking and writing
• How to sound convincing in explaining the background