Undergraduates often encounter difficulties with university assignments. Some challenges include finding resources on genre requirements and transferring general academic English skills to discipline-specific writing and speaking assignments. Beyond the credit-bearing English courses, students in senior year tend to have fewer opportunities to receive English training nor support at the time when they are required to finish the most daunting piece of writing – dissertations on their capstone projects. While discipline teachers focus on giving guidance about the nature of dissertation and the expected standard of work, there is little timely English support for senior-year students. In view of this, Christy CHAN May-see, Senior Tutor of CityU’s Chan Feng Men-ling Chan Shuk-lin Language Centre, formed an English Across the Curriculum (EAC) Team with other experienced English educators from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong Baptist University and The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology to provide additional English resources and training to senior-year students. The EAC team’s initiatives supplement standalone English courses and contain two main features: offering timely, tailor-made and targeted discipline-specific English learning materials; and creating synergy and opportunities for collaborations between English and discipline teachers. To date, EAC has reached over 30 departments, 60 courses, 100 teachers and 10,000 students in 5 local universities. The post-EAC surveys and interviews reflected positive impact on teaching and learning. 

The EAC team proudly won the UGC Collaborative Team Teaching Award 2021-22 on 26 September 2022, in recognition of the team’s outstanding interdisciplinary pedagogical work. This is the fourth time that CLASS faculty members have been honoured with a UGC teaching award since the inception of the Award in 2011.The sterling achievements of the interdisciplinary and interinstitutional EAC team have been lauded not just among UGC-funded institutions but in the tertiary sector locally and internationally. The EAC team members have been invited to speak on the EAC model in more than 28 presentations, colloquia, talks and keynote addresses worldwide. 

As the traditional mode of teaching and learning had been disrupted by the COVID-19 outbreak, the EAC team developed an interactive mobile app called Capstone Ninja. The first-of-its-kind, Capstone Ninja incorporates English learning modules and bite-sized quizzes/exercises, which enables undergraduates to access the discipline-specific, customised learning materials in real time when completing their capstone/final-year projects.  The app offers a mobile-enhanced solution which has proven to be a timely innovation that empowers both students and teachers. The app is not only available to local university students, but is also adopted by some universities in Japan, South Korea and mainland China.

Christy Chan and her team members believe that the key to success of language learning is for the learners to realise the relevance and importance to themselves, so that students will develop the motivation to self-study through different modes and learning resources. In 2022-23, the EAC team will continue to work with teacher-collaborators from different disciplines, with a view to providing student-centred and timely language support to improve students’ learning experiences, so as to enhance their performances in writing (and speaking) in the disciplines.