"Reading to Learn, Learning to Write" Pedagogy: How Effective is it on Teaching Narrative Writing to Non-Chinese Speaking Students?

The current paper aims to introduce the ‘Reading to Learn, Learning to Write” (R2L) pedagogy [11] and its application in teaching Chinese narrative writing to non-Chinese speaking (NCS) students in Hong Kong. Based on the needs of the NCS students in Chinese language learning for education and employment in Hong Kong, R2L pedagogy functions as an effective toolkit for L1 Chinese teachers to teach L2 NCS students to read and write Chinese texts successfully. Guided by the teaching and learning cycles accentuated in R2L pedagogy, sufficient scaffolding will be provided for students with teachers’ explicit inculcation. With a view to understanding the effect of using R2L pedagogy on genre writing, students’ preand post-tests representing their different levels of achievement (low, intermediate, high) will be evaluated and compared by R2L assessment criteria incorporating the four language dimensions of context, discourse, grammar, and graphic features [11]. The findings show a significant improvement of NCS students’ narrative writing in the post-tests after the pedagogic intervention in comparison with their pre-tests. It is hoped that the R2L-based pedagogic practices can be served as a teaching reference for L1 language teachers on their way to L2 language education.