Driven by previous successful experiences, Professor Isabella Poon from the Department of Statistics and Dr Jose Lai from the English Language Teaching Unit have collaborated again this year to bring the language learning fever back to the classroom of STAT3005 Applied Nonparametric Statistics. The session was held on 9 November, 2019.

As one of the content course assignments, students were asked to write a briefing paper, which is a formal business document for circulation among non-statisticians. Using these statistics students’ authentic writing, Dr Lai, the Chief Supervisor of the EAC project and Director of ELTU, delivered an interactive session on how a briefing paper should be constructed with close reference to their discipline. Active engagement of the students was noted. To deepen students’ learning of the highlighted language features, formative feedback was subsequently provided to individual students.

As an acclaimed professor of statistics, Professor Poon highly values such disciplinary language inputs for her students, who should not only be able to communicate through numbers but also language. She believes that this tailor-made session together with all other follow-up efforts, have undoubtedly heightened her students’ language awareness by bridging content learning with language acquisition.