Developing autonomous writers in a report writing course

Abstract

With the implementation of the 4-year curriculum in 2012 the current English enhancement courses for second year students offered by the Centre for Applied English Studies (CAES) of the University of Hong Kong will be replaced by 'English in the Discipline' courses which are jointly developed by the CAES and faculty. To align with the goal of the Faculty of Social Sciences in developing critical inquiry the course designers of 'Writing reports and proposals', one of the five courses to be offered to students of Social Sciences in the new curriculum, have adopted an inductive approach which allows students to participate as knowledge builders in writing. This approach aims to develop students into autonomous learners (Thornbury, 1999) through encouraging them to explore the relationship between language use and the purposes, context, and intended readership of different sub-genres of report writing, thereby enhancing their self-reliance in learning as well as their disciplinary-specific and professional literacies. This paper will discuss the evaluation of a pilot module on report writing conducted within an 'English for Professional Communication' course for second year students of Social Sciences. Teacher' and students' feedback on the module will be presented to reflect on the current development of the course.