R: Will it sound a little bit boring if we learn English in a Biology, a Science lesson?
Sc: Yeah, hehe, last time I heard a girl asking “why are we learning English?”
R: Yeah. Yeah.
Sc: So I told that girl that it may help. It also helps you that, when you do, in IH maybe, or in Biology, you have to write essays.
R: Yes.
Sc: And if you focus on that English language, you may know how to, some of them don’t know how to start, some of them don’t know how to end the passage or something like that. So you, when you learn this language or English language, you may know how to start the sentence, you may know how to end the sentence. It’s much good to learn this strategy.
R: So you explained to the girl who said “why do we need to learn this, it’s boring?”, right?
Sc: She just said that, “In Biology, English”? And what I said was like “Oh, it’s important” like uh “you have...” and then I explained to her, like I just now told you, and then she said, “Yeah, it’s really helpful”.
R: That’s understandable because that’s the very beginning, the first lesson we tried out this teaching material.
Sc: Yeah. （R: Researcher S: Student)
The HKU-QEF Project aims at building up culturally responsive curriculum resources to promote South Asian students' development of academic content knowledge and academic English literacy. To achieve this goal, the participating teachers have collaborated with the project team members to co-construct the CLIL curriculum resources. During the project period, the teachers have designed CLIL teaching materials and tried out various activities based on the knowledge and strategies of genre-based pedagogy they have acquired in the teacher capacity building workshops. These curriculum resources provided students with a series of language-related learning strategies which well cater for the diverse learning needs and styles among South Asian students in the school.
In a survey (44 students) at the end of the project, the South Asian students offered the project team their feedback about the CLIL learning strategies they have learned in their classroom activities. 93% of the the South Asian students believed "Academic English is important for my future study and occupation". Although only approximately 66% of the students admitted "Academic English is difficult for me" (in fact, many students admitted they were not confident about academic writing in English), 89% of them expressed that "I will try to use these learning strategies in my future study." 93% of the students suggested that "It will be helpful if teachers introduce strategies for learning Science in English." During the project period, semi-structured individual and group interviews (22 students in different semesters) were conducted at different stages of collaboration. Data collected show that students generally have positive attitudes towards the project. Although at the beginning some of the students could not understand the change of pedagogy and felt the discussion of language in the Science lesson "boring", they gradually found the language-related learning strategies "very helpful", "very useful“ and "so good" (See excerpts of interview transcriptions below). The various types of CLIL curriculum resources (vocabulary learning word-banks, re-edited text handouts, worksheets, PPT slides, graphic organisers, and revision booklets) have become collaborative reading activity and self-directed learning resources in class and at home.
Sb: This semester, I think I find the Physics easy.
R: Why easy?
Sb: I think because Mr X like start teaching us more properly. And also you (project members) start making more interesting. For example, the English things added and things like that. So I think that’s why I passed Physics this time without any difficulty. Also the worksheets you made for us, the quizzes, and it helped us a lot.
"It was helpful for us in, like, 'one in two'. Uh, it could also help us in English and also in Physics. And in Physics we could learn more about the Physics words, and the logical connectives and something. It could help us in grammar in English."
(Sa)
