Teaching development grants final and financial report: The development of an online English summary writing platform

The English Medium Instruction raises the needs of teaching English for specific purposes and helping students develop discipline-specific English language skills. Summary writing skills in such a disciplinary context are considered to be essential as students need to comprehend, synthesize and integrate source materials into their own academic writings. The current project developed an online English summary writing platform (ESWP) that can not only engage students in continuous practice for this skill, but also automatically generate scores and feedback to individual summaries. As a starting point, two discipline-based text banks, one for the Department of Health and Physical Education (HPE) and the other for the Department of Mathematics and Information Technology (MIT) were developed. Thirty students from the HPE department and the MIT department participated in this project through participating in summary writing workshops and writing summaries using the ESWP. The newly created ESWP, trained by summaries developed by content experts, generated automatic scores and feedback for students. Students perceived that the ESWP offered chance for them to self-evaluate their own summaries and regulate their own learning. The established platform can be used as self-learning programme for summary writing practice for students undertaking honors projects in HPE and MIT.