On 18 January, 2018, Ms Olive Cheung (Senior Lecturer of ELTU and Co-Supervisor of the EAC Social Science Team) and Mr Matthew Knowles (Assistant Lecturer of ELTU) conducted a joint workshop with Professor Murat Es (Coordinator of the Capstone Project for the Urban Studies Programme) to support students’ writing in the discipline. The workshop had focused on the structural and language issues surrounding the key sections in an Urban Studies capstone thesis. To prepare for this workshop, the EAC team had collected 18 student samples of varying grades and conducted a textual analysis in order to identify the specific language needs of the students.

The results of the post-workshop evaluation indicated that students had found learning through authentic examples within their discipline to be helpful and that the workshop activities conducted (e.g. how to use a corpus) was beneficial to their English learning in the discipline. Dr Es also reflected that the tailor-made session has certainly increased the language awareness among the students and would like to continue the collaboration between the Urban Studies Programme and the EAC team in the next academic year.