Engaging senior-year admitted students’ academic literacies across the discipline: A language practitioner’s perspectives

Abstract

Senior-year admitted students (SYAS) in Hong Kong, similar to community college transfer students in the U.S., refers to a cohort of sub-degree programme graduates who are admitted to a top-up bachelor’s degree programme. Despite increasing SYAS intakes in Hong Kong universities, published studies on the teaching of SYAS are still scarce. This qualitative case study aims to explore a language practitioner’s praxes of interdisciplinary teaching within the context of an academic literacy course in the discipline of applied child development. Eight weeks of classroom observations and two in-depth interviews with the practitioner were conducted. This study concludes by discussing dialogue-based interactivity to boost SYAS’ academic and disciplinary literacies. The analysis from observation field-notes and verbatim transcripts suggests an action timeline featuring the mediation of reflections and enactments to make manifest the pedagogical considerations facing the language practitioner for SYAS.