Systematic Scaffolding for Student Success: Effective Pedagogical Practices in Academic Literacy Classrooms

Abstract

The notion of teaching excellence has received increasing attention in the higher education sector; yet, it seems to still be an elusive concept which varies from context to context. To us, it represents a continual endeavour for teachers to offer the best possible learning experience to their students and create for them the best chance of success. In an English-medium university, teachers of English for academic and specific purposes are expected to provide support to foster students’ communicative competence in participating in meaningful discussions with teachers and peers in academic and professional communities. In this presentation, as main developers of four academic English literacy courses for students at the University of Hong Kong, we will share and reflect on our practice of how our students are scaffolded to achieve the course learning outcomes and prepared to complete the course assessment tasks so that they can pursue their university studies with better confidence. In these courses, an experiential approach is adopted where students conduct a small-scale research project on a self-identified discipline-specific topic by interviewing a few key stakeholders concerned. They then analyse the data collected and produce a written research report and deliver a research oral presentation based on their findings. Different forms of structured scaffolding are provided at various stages throughout the course to ensure students’ successful completion of the research project and assessment tasks, such as a database of journal articles at a level suitable for undergraduates to understand, a research plan template that records essential details of a research study, individual face-to-face consultation sessions where students discuss with their teachers the progress of the project and difficulties they have encountered, and formative teacher feedback on report drafts and presentation rehearsals that identify strengths and areas for improvement with the aim of feeding back and feeding forward. These practices have received rather positive feedback among students (as revealed in end-of-course student evaluation and Staff-Student Consultative Committees meetings with student representatives), course teachers and external examiners over the years. They consider the support given as pivotal to students’ learning and mastery of course content, for students are given ample opportunities to receive critical but constructive feedback along the way which helps them not only to produce better quality work, but reflect on their own learning and set future goals. These skills, which can be transferred to other contexts and courses, are highly valued and essential for success in higher education and beyond, and should be cultivated under the culture of teaching excellence in university learning and teaching. The high effectiveness of these English courses is largely attributable to disciplinary staff’ input regarding the language needs of their students and language teachers’ expertise in designing and delivering these courses to address these needs. In light of our experience, we will call for continued collaboration and support from faculty teachers and, more broadly, from the university community in recognition of the value of academic English literacy courses as key contributors to high quality student learning in higher education.