Communication-intensive Courses Symposium 2023

Date: 3 May, 2023 (Wednesday)
Time: 9:30 am – 4:30 pm
Venue: Digital Interactive Lab, Main Library
Target Audience: All HKU staff (including those who have badged CIC courses and those who haven’t)


Objectives

At the end of the Symposium, participants will be able to:

1. Understand the need for academic literacy across the curriculum
2. Know how to embed academic literacy in disciplinary course teaching

Programme

Time	Activity
9:30 – 9:35	Opening Speaker: Professor Ian Holliday Vice-President and Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Teaching and Learning), HKU
9:35 – 10:20	Keynote: Integrating development of students’ communication skills into course teaching and assessment I will begin by discussing the need for integrating the development of communication skills into subject teaching, as these skills are discipline-specific and require students’ understanding of the discipline’s communicative conventions and discourses. As communication is integral to disciplinary knowledge construction and transfer, communicative competence cannot be separated from subject knowledge, but needs to be developed as part of subject teaching. For various reasons, however, many subject lecturers reject, or struggle with, the responsibility to teach communication skills. The aim of my talk is to demonstrate how students’ communicative competence, particularly in speaking and writing, can be enhanced as part of lecturers’ regular teaching and assessment practices. I will propose five methods of integrating a focus on communication into teaching and assessment and show examples of the use of these methods across several disciplines. Lastly, I will explain how subject lecturers, who are often not explicitly aware of their discipline’s communicative conventions, can be supported by language/English for Academic Purposes specialists in applying these methods. Speaker: Dr. Ursula Wingate School of Education, Communication & Society, King's College London Dr. Ursula Wingate’s main interests are theoretical and pedagogical models underpinning academic literacy instruction, English language policies and practices, and language teaching methodology. In recent projects, she has developed various genre-based approaches to teaching academic literacy in higher education, drawing on corpora of student texts for the creation of instructional resources in different disciplines. In her publications, she promotes an inclusive and curriculum-integrated model of academic literacy instruction, which is based on the collaboration of literacy experts with academics in the disciplines. Ursula works in the School’s Centre for Language, Discourse and Communication, and is the convenor of the Forum for Academic Language and Literacy (FALL). She teaches on various programmes and also supervises several doctoral students. She was joint editor of the Language Learning Journal from 2011 to 2015, and regularly reviews papers for various academic journals.
10:20 – 10:30	10 min break
10:30 – 11:00	Teacher voices: Developing content knowledge through writing Teachers share their experience enhancing senior level students’ written communication competence in law and medicine courses. Speakers: Dr. Masayo Kotaka School of Biomedical Sciences, LKS Faculty of Medicine, HKU Dr. Masayo Kotaka is Senior Lecturer in the School of Biomedical Sciences, LKS Faculty of Medicine. Masayo obtained her PhD from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and pursued postdoctoral training in Structural Biology at HKU, the University of Oxford, UK and at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She was Head of Research in a start-up company based at the Hong Kong Science Park before re-joining the School of Biomedical Sciences in 2018. She has a strong interest in developing undergraduate courses in Entrepreneurship in Biomedical Sciences and Biotechnology, and also in developing communication literacies in undergraduates to enhance students’ career-readiness. Wilson Lui Faculty of Law, HKU Wilson is Pre-Doctoral Fellow and part-time Lecturer at the Faculty of Law of the University of Hong Kong. He designs and teaches courses for undergraduates and postgraduates on private international law (conflict of laws), use of language in law, and legal Chinese, including the CI-badged course LLAW3275 Legal Language in Hong Kong: Issues and Directions. He also publishes widely on law, linguistics, higher education, and their connections and interactions.
11:00 – 11:15	Student voices: Can writing be enjoyable? Students share their experiences developing their writing skills in CiC Common Core and faculty courses. Speakers: Ocean Wang Year 3, BSocSc, Art History and Sociology, HKU Ocean is majoring in Art History and Sociology. In CCST9081 “All You’ve Ever wanted to Know About Humans”, she produced a four-episode podcast about the emotive and philosophical aspects of death with other two classmates. After several bone lab sessions, like her fellow classmates, she also wrote a skeletal report analyzing a mystery skull with knowledge learned in the class. Hanna Marcella Kurniawan Year 2, BSc, Food & Nutritional Science and Finance, HKU Hanna is majoring in Food & Nutritional Science and Finance (BSc). She has taken two CiC courses, namely CCST9076 and SCNC1112, where she completed assignments such as debates, presentations, and essay writing which helped refine her ability to communicate in different mediums.
11:15 – 11:25	10 min break
11:25 – 12:25	Peer consultant voices: It takes a student to teach a student The Writing Centre coordinator and writing peer consultants share how consultations are structured to help students with their written academic assignments in multiple disciplines. Speakers: Sam Cole, Writing Centre Coordinator, CAES , HKU Jack Chan, Year 3, BA&BEd, English, HKU Celeste Lee, Year 4, BSocSc, Psychology and English, HKU Tristan Li, Year 5, BBA&LLB, HKU Yoshita Singh, Year 3, BEcon&Fin, HKU Hayley Hunt, Year 3, PhD Earth Science, HKU
12:25 – 14:00	1.5 hrs Lunch
14:00 – 15:30	Enhancing students’ academic writing through genre analysis and targeted feedback In this workshop, I offer more details on, and some hands-on experience of, two of the methods that I proposed in my talk. Both methods aim at the enhancement of students’ academic writing competence. The first involves the creation of teaching/learning resources that enable students to carry out analyses of annotated exemplars of assignment genres. I will provide various examples from a range of disciplines where this method was applied. The second method is concerned with the type of feedback lecturers provide on students’ written texts. I will show examples of lecturers’ difficulties in the exact identification of weaknesses in texts, which prevent them from formulating formative feedback comments. Participants will be asked to collaboratively analyse some extracts from student texts, pinpoint their shortcomings and formulate feedback comments that help students to address these shortcomings. Speaker: Dr. Ursula Wingate School of Education, Communication & Society King's College London Dr. Ursula Wingate’s main interests are theoretical and pedagogical models underpinning academic literacy instruction, English language policies and practices, and language teaching methodology. In recent projects, she has developed various genre-based approaches to teaching academic literacy in higher education, drawing on corpora of student texts for the creation of instructional resources in different disciplines. In her publications, she promotes an inclusive and curriculum-integrated model of academic literacy instruction, which is based on the collaboration of literacy experts with academics in the disciplines. Ursula works in the School’s Centre for Language, Discourse and Communication, and is the convenor of the Forum for Academic Language and Literacy (FALL). She teaches on various programmes and also supervises several doctoral students. She was joint editor of the Language Learning Journal from 2011 to 2015, and regularly reviews papers for various academic journals.
15:30 – 16:15	ChatGPT, write me an essay on… Panel discussion on how generative AI will impact the teaching and learning of written communication in higher education Speakers: Dr. Michelle Raquel CAES, HKU Dr. Jack Tsao Common Core, HKU Dr. Miranda Legg CAES, HKU Donn Gonda CETL, HKU
16:15	Closing Speakers: Prof. Julian Tanner Director, Common Core, HKU

For information, please contact:
Mr. William Yieu, CETL
Phone: 3917 8192; Email: wyieu@hku.hk