In the HKU-QEF Project, student workshops were organised to introduce useful learning strategies to support students' development of academic content knowledge and academic literacy skills. For example, due to the limit of lesson time in the science subjects, the participating teachers intended to make good use of extracurricular activities such as student workshop to provide their students with more language-related learning strategies. As defining is a fundamental academic function that appears in almost all subjects in secondary school curriculum, in Student Workshop 1, the Physics teacher decided to teach students how to define science concepts and how to solve the workbook problems by interpreting definitions of the key Physics concepts correctly. The definitions of the Physics concepts in the textbook glossary were adapted into a sentence-making table which illustrates the key sentence patterns of the defining function explicitly. The workbook exercises related to the corresponding concept were also listed beside the concept definition so as to encourage students to use the language function to solve the science problems. Besides the defining function, using graphic organisers to build up relationships between science concepts was also introduced to the students as another useful learning strategy. Again, relevant workbook exercises were arranged beside the corresponding section in the graphic organisers so as to allow students to experience the advantage of using language-related learning strategies to facilitate their content knowledge development.
To carry out CLIL/LAC activities in the school, it is very necessary to have regular communication between teachers of different subjects to share effective teaching experience and also to provide mutual support through collaboration. In Student Workshop 2 entitled “English for Science”, teachers from different subjects (i.e., English, Math, Physics, Chemistry and Biology) co-organised activities which aimed at introducing CLIL learning strategies to South Asian students. Before the workshop, the teachers and panel heads from different subjects had prepared the learning materials together based on the "Genre-egg" Model and the content knowledge in different subjects. They designed group-work activities to help students to practise strategies which are useful for learning both English and science subjects. During the workshop, the teachers from different subjects joined the students’ group-work and guided them to finish the learning tasks in different activities. The English teacher demonstrated how to learn science English by paying attention to vocabulary pronunciation and spelling strategies (e.g., syllabication), word formation strategies (e.g., prefixes and suffixes), distinguishing between everyday words (or sometimes called ‘baby words’ for easy understanding) and academic words, and classification of academic vocabulary into different categories (e.g., subject-specific words, general academic words and logical connectors). The CLIL teachers introduced different academic functions in learning science subjects and typical academic text types in secondary school learning; for example, the Physics teacher guided the students to identify sentence patterns for different academic functions (e.g., “defining” expressed by the sentence pattern “X is/refers to Y+ modifier”); and the Biology teacher illustrated how to write science reports by following the procedure of science research and paying attention to the corresponding organisation of the science report text type.
