Teaching development grants final and financial report: Promoting collaborative team-teaching in BA (Lang Studies) Common Core courses: An action research project

The six Common Core courses (18 credits) in the newly approved BA (Lang Studies) programme are designed to facilitate the development of bilingual academic competence. This is achieved by teaching content courses in Chinese (Cantonese/Putonghua) or English to both Chinese majors and English majors (see Table 1 below). Two of the six Common Core courses will be taught in 2010-11. Each of them will be team-taught by two academic staff, one each from the Department of Chinese and Department of English. Seamless collaboration between teachers of Common Core courses as a prerequisite for high-quality team-teaching is the ultimate goal of this project. A number of challenges are anticipated, notably: •Team-teaching involving colleagues from the two language departments has not been done before; there is thus a need to explore and experiment with good practices; •Communication between lecturer and tutor from different departments may be a problem if either or both are not sufficiently well-versed in the other language(s); and •It is unclear how classroom code-switching in the lectures and tutorials - arguably inevitable with some Common Core courses - will impact the quality of teaching and students' learning. Through multi-methods - class observation, audio-visual recording of lectures and tutorials, keeping weekly logs, bi-weekly meetings with lecturers and tutors, and focus group interviews with students - this proposed action research project is designed to monitor the delivery of the two Common Core courses in 2010-11, track problems arising and assess the effectiveness of various situated coping strategies. The findings will help identify best practices of inter-departmental team-teaching. This in turn will help ensure high-quality teaching and learning in the BA (Lang Studies) programme. It is also conceivable that the findings may inform research on classroom code-switching, among other possible areas.