Feedback about Student Workshops

The two student workshops during the project period both aimed to support South Asian students' academic development by providing strategies that facilitate their learning of academic content knowledge and academic English literacy. 

In Student Workshop 1, students found the workshop handouts (Student Workshop 1_Booklet) very helpful for their revision of their Science subjects as some of them told the project members "I will use that to study exam", "I used that in exams", "In order to get points" (See group interview below).  They were able to make use of the introduced strategies (defining and using graphic organisers) to clarify the key concepts and to summarise the important knowledge points in the Science subjects.  Some students could even associate the language-related strategies with what they had learned in their English lessons (e.g., "defining" and the grammar point "(non-) defining relative clauses"; "graphic organisers" and the organisation of "text structure in their writing lessons"). This indicates that the Student Workshop activities have not only raised South Asian students' language awareness in learning their academic content knowledge but also helped to foster a sense of achievement and learner autonomy in the students which may enable them to build up their confidence in pursuing future study in higher education and hence form a positive self-image in the school and the society.

The HKU-QEF Project not only aims at building up teacher capacity in promoting South Asian students' academic development but also targets at the collaboration among teachers from different subjects which is one of the long-term goals of the project. Inspired by the genre-based CLIL pedagogy introduced in the teacher capacity-building workshops as well as the experience sharing by the seed participating teachers, some teachers in other subjects (e.g., Science and English) would like to try out the CLIL curriculum resources in their own subject.  Before Student Workshop 2, the panel heads and teachers in the Science, Math and English subjects joined together to prepare for the workshop activities. They also attended the workshop and provided scaffolding for their students to fulfill the learning tasks. Hence, the student workshop became an opportunity when both teachers and students raise their academic language awareness; above all, an opportunity to reinforce the student-teacher and teacher-teacher interactions which will be very significant for the sustainability of the CLIL/LAC project in the school.