Bulletin Number One 1986

The English Language Teaching Unit The English Language Teaching (ELT) Unit was formally established in August 1984 as an independent teaching department within the Faculty of Arts. Its establishment is a recognition of the fact that language teaching is a separate professional and academic discipline drawing on other disciplines for much of its intellectual support. The ELT Unit's main academic function within the university community is to ensure the bilingual proficiency of its undergraduates during their four years of higher education. It also strives to advance this proficiency to the level required by the other teaching departments of the University and by the demands that Hong Kong has and will have for bilingual professionals. The ELT Unit has been fortunately established during the transitional period of Hong Kong's integration into China. China, now in the process of modernizing itself, has an even greater need than before for highly proficient bilingual professionals and specialists to serve both Hong Kong and the People's Republic of China in taking up their future joint international role. The Unit is staffed by twenty-one language teaching professionals, all of whom have an advanced degree or professional qualification in language teaching or a related discipline. In addition to its established professional staff, the Unit is annually assisted by recent American graduates from Williams College, Wellesley College and Princeton University, who serve as exchange tutors. In what is becoming increasingly an age of information processing and transfer, the teaching of language and communication skills has taken on a new importance, a fact which has not been lost on the staff of the Unit. The discipline of language teaching is an authentic bridge discipline insofar as it enables the diverse disciplines of the humanities, social sciences and sciences to interact. The Unit functions in a way analogous to clinical departments in a medical school: it has a teaching responsibility, a service responsibility, and a research responsibility. Teaching Responsibility To fulfill its teaching responsibility the ELT Unit maintains two levels of courses, the First Year General English (FYGE) programme and the Advanced English Proficiency (AEP) programme. The FYGE programme is responsible for teaching English communicati skills to the first-year students in order to facilitate their academic success during the four undergraduate years. At present the FYGE courses are faculty-based, and all freshmen are required to take this course unless exempted on the basis of their grade in the First Year English Placement Test, which is prepared and administered by the Unit. In the 1985-86 academic year nearly 600 undergraduates were enrolled in the FYGE programme. The AEP programme consists of a focused set of courses which allow the students to concentrate on certain communication skills as they prepare for their professional careers both in Hong Kong and elsewhere. AEP courses include business communications, composition and oral communication. The curricula for these courses are under constant review, always taking into account the needs of the students and the changing demands of the academic community and the society at large. In the 1985-86 academic year nearly 600 undergraduates each semester were enrolled in the AEP programme. Service Responsibility The Unit's main service responsibility within the University consists of the two main assessment exercises required annually by the University. One is the Final Scholastic Assessment which determines whether the Form VI students offered a provisional place by the University have maintained their level of academic excellence. In the summer of 1985 over 1,600 candidates were assessed by the Unit. The other assessment exercise is the Placement Test for the incoming freshmen, administered in late August, which screens those students most in need of further English instruction in order to successfully complete their academic studies. With the University's implementatio of the new curriculum, the Unit may need to consider added responsibilities for assessing the language abilities of students and seeing that a high level of English competence is maintained. This would first involve determining what the minimum standard should be for a Chinese University graduate in the various disciplines. 16 RECENT DEVELOPMENTS