Abstract:
The English Medium Instruction raises the needs of teaching English for specific purposes and helping students develop discipline-specific English language skills. Summary writing skills in such a disciplinary context are considered to be essential as students need to comprehend, synthesize and integrate source materials into their own academic writings. The current project developed an online English summary writing platform (ESWP) that can not only engage students in continuous practice for this skill, but also automatically generate scores and feedback to individual summaries. As a starting point, two discipline-based text banks, one for the Department of Health and Physical Education (HPE) and the other for the Department of Mathematics and Information Technology (MIT) were developed. Thirty students from the HPE department and the MIT department participated in this project through participating in summary writing workshops and writing summaries using the ESWP. The newly created ESWP, trained by summaries developed by content experts, generated automatic scores and feedback for students. Students perceived that the ESWP offered chance for them to self-evaluate their own summaries and regulate their own learning. The established platform can be used as self-learning programme for summary writing practice for students undertaking honors projects in HPE and MIT.
Code:
T0182
Principal Project Supervisors:
Keywords provided by authors:
Start Date:
01 Apr 2017
End Date:
31 Mar 2018
Status:
Completed
Result:
An on-line English summary writing platform (ESWP) was developed in this project. The ESWP can engage students in continuous practice for writing a summary in their own disciplines, and automatically generate scores and feedback to individual summaries. Such a platform offers students to practise summary writing on their own initiatives, so as to develop their summary writing skills. Students who participated in the project responded positively towards such a learning platform. The learning experience supported by the ESWP helped with discipline-specific language learning. Feedback provided by the ESWP made them aware of features of good summaries, helped them identify problems they had in language use, and allowed them to reflect on their own weaknesses. Thus the ESWP offered chance for students to do self-study on summary writing and self-regulate their own learning.
Impact:
The current project created a discipline-specific on-line summary writing platform, which could be used to support the development of students' discipline-specific summary writing skills in English language. Such discipline-specific writing skills are considered to be essential for students to study in the English Medium universities. The current project thus developed a tool that can support students' discipline-specific summary writing skills and contributes to the understanding of strategies that can support university students' discipline-specific language learning in the EMI context
Deliverables:
Books/ Book Chapters/ Journal Articles/ Conference Papers
Xiao, Y., & Cheung, H. T. (2018, June). Supporting EMI students' summary writing skills in the university context. Paper presented at The 16th Asia TEFL 1st MAAL & 6th HAAL 2018 International Conference: English Language Teaching in the Changing Glocalised World: Research and Praxis, University of Macau, Macau, China. (https://repository.eduhk.hk/en/publications/supporting-emi-students-summary-writing-skills-in-the-university-)
Seminars/Presentations/Sharing Sessions
Liu, F. M. C. & Xiao, Y. Y. S. (2018, January 31, February 6 & 27). Summary writing skills for Department of Mathematics and Information Technology (MIT) and Department of Health and Physical Education (HPE) students. Workshop conducted at The Education University of Hong Kong. (No. of participants: 30 – 20 from MIT and 10 from HPE)(https://repository.eduhk.hk/en/publications/78e684b8-f0f8-41c5-b1cd-ef259b94d762)
Cheung, H. T. & Xiao, Y. Y. (2018, June 7). The development of an online English summary writing platform for discipline-specific language learning. Presentation at The Education University of Hong Kong. (No. of participants: 17)(https://repository.eduhk.hk/en/publications/6f08baaa-dac8-4a75-8f9e-f5ed9f7ee886)
Cheung, H. T. & Xiao, Y. Y. (2018, June 12). The development of an online English summary writing platform for discipline-specific language learning. Presentation at The Education University of Hong Kong. (No. of participants: 25) (https://repository.eduhk.hk/en/publications/6f08baaa-dac8-4a75-8f9e-f5ed9f7ee886)
Xiao, Y. Y. & Cheung, H. T. (2018, June). Supporting students’ discipline-specific summary writing skills through an on-line learning platform. Paper presented at The 16th Asia TEFL International Conference, the University of Macau, Macau. (No. of participants: 742).(https://repository.eduhk.hk/en/publications/c147d646-612f-4475-893f-8461da8aa26f)
Teaching and Learning Resources/ Materials (including online resources)
Two packages of source texts for summary writing practice for students in HPE and MIT.
An online English summary writing platform: https://moodle.eduhk.hk/enrol/index.php?id=33723 (https://repository.eduhk.hk/en/publications/6b7b1d38-eb4b-47f1-81b8-e06bbf7992b2)
Financial Year:
2016-17
Type:
TDG