Coordinator: Dr. Ken HO
Course Description:
This English-in-the-Discipline course is designed to help students to respond effectively to the communication demands of their studio programmes and their future careers. The focus is on raising students’ awareness of the genre of professional discourse by providing them with opportunities to enhance their linguistic range in their approach to architectural, cultural, real-estate & built environment literacy. Activities are organised through engagement in project-based discussion and written tasks designed to simulate the English Language demands on Architectural, Surveying & Built Environment professionals. The out-of-class learning component of the course will supplement the main aims by consolidating use of vocabulary related to architectural, real estate & built environment and further enhancing students’ writing. Students will also become familiar with self-evaluation and with resources they can access to take responsibility to improve their own language skills in future.
Learning Outcomes:
By the end of the course, students should be able to:
- Use persuasive language in speaking and writing
- Demonstrate spontaneous speaking skills as commonly applied in professional contexts
- Organise and conduct an effective data-collection interview with members of the professional community in HK
- Analyse and produce the tone and structure of formal business correspondence and reports
- Reflect on and evaluate their own linguistic performance on spoken/written tasks and identify areas for improvement
Strategies:
- Topics & teaching aims determined in collaboration with Faculty staff
- Assessment is wholly by continuous assessment which reflects the course learning outcomes
- Highly interactive teaching style based on class-groups of approx. 20 students & expectation of high attendance levels.
Assessment Methods:
(with breakdown of percentage weighting of the various methods)
- Group learning work (35%)
- Other genres of writing (35%)
- Tests (30%)