The effectiveness of using 'reading to learn, learning to write' pedagogy in teaching Chinese to non-Chinese speaking students in Hong Kong

This paper examines the effectiveness of 'Reading to Learn' (R2L) pedagogy (Rose & Martin, 2012) in teaching Chinese to non-Chinese speaking students in Hong Kong. Junior secondary students were taught to read and write texts of different genres in Chinese in an after-hour class for a year using the R2L pedagogy. Students were asked to write a composition before and after each genre teaching cycle. During the teaching cycle, teachers scaffolded students' writing through preparing for reading, detailed reading, joint re-writing, sentence-making, and joint construction. This paper selects writings from students representing the low, medium and high achievers. Their pre- and post-teaching scripts are analyzed for aspects of transitivity, modality, and cohesion using a Systemic Functional Linguistic (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004) framework. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to reveal students' perceptions and teachers' reflections on R2L pedagogy. Text analysis of the pre- and post-teaching writing suggests that students with different learning abilities are capable of composing much longer and better organized texts with genre-based schematic structure and diversified lexicogrammatical resources after experiencing R2L pedagogy. It is hoped that the findings can provide information to improve the teaching of Chinese as a second language for non-Chinese speaking students in Hong Kong.