Bio:

Dr Jose Lai is the Director cum Director of Studies of the English Language Teaching Unit at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). In addition to the general management of the Unit, she oversees the development, implementation, and review of curricula as well as large-scale funded projects. Her work on English Across the Curriculum (EAC), an institutional movement formally launched at CUHK since 2016, has earned for her project team the University Education Award 2022 for their significant contribution to enhancing the traditional landscape of English language education at the University and beyond. Externally, Dr Lai also serves as reviewer of academic journals and research grants.

Speech Title:

English Across the Curriculum (EAC) at CUHK: Advancing an Institutional Culture for Enhancing Academic Literacies Across Disciplines

Abstract:

The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) is a comprehensive research university which adopts a bilingual language policy of Chinese and English. Within the eight Faculties, there are over 80 major and minor undergraduate programs with many of them being inter-disciplinary in nature. In preparing university students for academic success and beyond, disciplinary literacy, the ability to understand and contextualize the use of language within a subject/discipline for academic purposes, is found to be a much-needed yet easily-neglected area in higher education. While content professors are mostly preoccupied with teaching subject knowledge, they hardly have time to address students’ language issues in the learning process. Worse still, students are often unaware of their insufficient academic literacy for successful learning in the disciplines. Drawing on the theoretical framework of Community of Practice (CoP), the English Across the Curriculum (EAC) Team at CUHK argues that this gap can only be bridged by collaborating closely with content teachers using flexible models that provide bespoke interventions to each discipline or each program/collaboration. The Team also believes that to achieve sustainability, an institutional culture that upholds inter-disciplinary collaboration through setting up a collaborative community must be advanced.