Research an effective vehicle for developing well-rounded skills

Published: 12:00am, 4 May 2007

HKU Space Community College is aware of the need for research as a means of developing students' critical thinking skills and a sense of professionalism.

In the spring of 2005, several lecturers, including myself, embarked on a semester-long project designed to meet the needs mentioned and enhance students' English-language skills.

The first students' conference at the community college level to be held in Hong Kong was the culmination of the project and last week we held the third, with the theme 'language, community and education'.

The project began with selecting the conference participants. Fourteen advanced-level students were assigned advisers to oversee their work and provide feedback.

Planning for the conference also began early. Five keynote speakers - all scholars and experts in the fields of language, community and education - were invited to make presentations.

We designed 12 training workshops focusing on the linguistic and research skills our students needed. Subjects included:

Topic selection and preliminary reading: students chose topics and proposed preliminary research questions. Their advisers then provided them with relevant reading materials that were used for background and guided reading skills practice. Background reading helped build a solid foundation in the subject matter before they began their research work. Guided reading tasks helped students learn to read beyond the literal level of a text and develop critical thinking skills.

Vocabulary development: this was an ongoing process. The preliminary readings and workshop setting helped students acquire much of the technical or academic vocabulary needed for further work on their chosen topics. In order to encourage greater reliance on English throughout the project, students were given a monolingual English dictionary and encouraged to study vocabulary by noticing how it was used in their readings, rather than resorting to memorisation in Chinese as they typically would have done.

Academic reading skills: after developing general background knowledge on their research topics, students began more serious reading. They learned to search for answers to their research questions. They gathered, organised, analysed and synthesised information from their readings. They began to make generalisations or assertions about their new learning.

Writing and research skills: at the beginning, students wrote opinion pieces about their topics. Later, they wrote more critical papers based on their readings. The advisers presented information about qualitative and quantitative research strategies and examined advantages and disadvantages of various research instruments such as questionnaires, interviews, case studies and observations. We explained the format of a typical professional research paper. Then, students drafted their own papers, with advisers providing comments used to revise and polish the papers.

Speaking skills: students practised their conference presentations in several workshop sessions. Advisers applied writing process techniques to the oral component of the project, building in numerous opportunities for feedback and revision. Students held their own group discussion sessions about their strengths and weaknesses and how to deal with them.

The general consensus was that students' English language proficiency grew as a result of the workshops.

We met the goals we had set at the beginning. Briefly, these were enabling students to develop English-language and research skills, interact with professionals in an academic setting and share their research with others.

While the project was a success, it also consumed an enormous amount of time and effort on the part of the organisers. Its underlying concept, a project in which students acquire both language and academic skills and then present their findings in a public forum, could be adapted for a wide variety of settings.

Some teachers may be unable to work in as large or as cohesive a team as we were able to do. They may need to plan less ambitious workshops and projects. Some teachers may want to involve many more students, rather than selecting a few, as we did. If so, students could work on group rather than individual projects.

Less ambitious variations of the culminating event are also possible. For example, students might hold a poster session, an open house for parents or invite another class to listen to their oral presentations. When resident experts are unavailable, school officials, local celebrities or other respected community elders could be the special guests.

If a single public event requires too much organisation, students could take turns presenting their work on a weekly basis. The essential elements of our project were student-led investigation, attention to building skills that ensured success, use of the target language in all stages and a public forum in which to showcase student learning.

Wong Lap-tuen is a lecturer of English at the Hong Kong University School of Professional and Continuing Education who organised a conference this week on Language, Community and Education.

Education Post is published by the South China Morning Post, GPO Box 47, Hong Kong. Tel 2565 2222, fax 2811 1048, e-mail [email protected]

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