The development of an online English summary writing platform for discipline-specific language learning

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 TDG 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 summary. 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. The platform was trained by summaries written by content experts in respective disciplines. Thirty students from the HPE and the MIT departments participated in this project through participating in summary writing workshops and writing summaries using the ESWP. Students perceived that the ESWP offered chance for them to self-evaluate their own summaries and regulate their own learning; and such a discipline-specific learning platform supported their discipline-specific language learning. The established platform can be used as a self-learning programme for summary writing practice for students undertaking honors projects in the HPE and the MIT departments. Copyright © 2018 The Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK).