Engaging senior-year admitted students with disciplinary literacy: A cases in applied child development

Abstract

In the Hong Kong context, senior-year admitted (SYA) students refer to those sub-degree program graduates who are afterwards admitted to a two-year self-financing top-up bachelor’s degree program or a senior-year place in a governmentfunded counterpart. To facilitate SYA students’ transition, language practitioners at the degree programs need to focus on discipline-specific literacy for targeted discourse communities. Whilst teaching across disciplines in higher education has been widely examined in hard sciences, seemingly little is known regarding soft sciences, not to mention the scenarios involving SYA students. Contextualized in an academic English course in the discipline of applied childhood development, this study aims to explore the praxes of interdisciplinary teaching for SYA students and unveil the practitioner’s disciplinary considerations. In this qualitative inquiry, 8 weeks of classroom observations, along with 2 interviews with the practitioner were conducted. The analysis from observation field-notes and verbatim transcripts suggests an action timeline featuring the evolving processes of reflection and enactment to make manifest the practitioner’s interdisciplinary engagement with SYA students’ prior knowledge. The study also concludes with varying forms of dialogue-based interactivity to reinforce SYA students to become ‘disciplinary insiders’. Pedagogical challenges such as adjusting teaching materials and providing discipline-related feedback will also be explored.