Gateway Education English

Gateway Education (GE) English is the major component of language enhancement for undergraduate students at CityU. This forms part of their graduation requirements. These include 3 credits each of freshman English, GE1401 University English, and discipline-specific English. Please refer to this page for the details of GE requirement.

The discipline-specific English courses for students from different colleges and schools are listed as follows:

College of Business GE2402 English for Business Communication
College of Engineering GE2410 English for Engineering
College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences GE2412 English for the Humanities and Social Sciences
College of Science GE2401 English for Science
College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences GE2401 English for Science
School of Creative Media GE2413 Word, Sound and Image: Writing for Creative Media
School of Data Science GE2401 English for Science / GE2410 English for Engineering
School of Energy and Environment GE2410 English for Engineering
School of Law GE2411 Legal English

Teaching of GE English courses is delivered by the Department of English and the Chan Feng Men-ling Chan Shuk-lin Language Centre (LC). The contact of your GE English teachers could be found as follows:

Information for CLASS and SCM students about discontinued GE English courses

Seven discipline-specific Gateway Education (GE) English courses for CLASS and SCM students are discontinued after summer 2018. These courses are:

  • GE2404 Asia Literature in English;
  • GE2405 Creative Writing;
  • GE2406 Shakespeare: Introduction to Genius;
  • GE2407 Reading Lives, Writing Selves: Autobiography and Culture;
  • GE2408 Travel writing: Discovery and experience;
  • GE2409 Words and images: Reading and writing in the 21st Century, and;
  • GE3401 Exploring English Cinema.

To fulfill the requirement of discipline-specific GE English, two new courses will be offered from Semester A 2018/19:

  1. GE2412 English for the humanities and social sciences for CLASS students; and
  2. GE2413 Word, Sound and Image: Writing for creative media for SCM students.

Please note the followings:

A: SCM or CLASS students who have not yet taken the discipline-specific GE course to fulfil GE requirement

If you have not taken the discipline-specific GE English course to fulfil the GE requirement1, you can choose to:

  1. take one of the existing courses (GE2404, GE2405, GE2406, GE2407, GE2408, GE2409 or GE3401) in Semester B 2017-18 or Summer 2018 (please refer to point B below); OR
  2. take the new GE English course, namely GE2413 Word, sound and image: Writing for creative media (for SCM students) or GE2412 English for the humanities and social sciences (for CLASS students) from Semester A 2018/19 onwards.
B: SCM or CLASS students who have taken a discipline-specific GE course but failed or received a D

SCM or CLASS students who have taken one of the existing discipline-specific GE courses but failed, or who passed with a D grade and wish to improve it, can retake that course. You are strongly encouraged to do so in either Semester B, 2017-18 or Summer 2018 as the last offering of these courses may be Summer 2018.

Please note that according to the University's Academic Regulations2, you cannot use the newly proposed courses, namely GE2413 Word, sound and image: Writing for creative media or GE2412 English for the humanities and social sciences, to recover a failure or to improve a course grade of D for GE2404/GE2405/GE2406/GE2407/GE2408/ GE2409/GE3401.

C: SCM or CLASS students who have taken a discipline-specific GE course to fulfil GE requirement

If you have already passed a discipline-specific GE English course, you can count that toward graduation and will not be affected by the proposed changes.

You are strongly encouraged to fulfil the discipline-specific GE English requirement as early as possible. Should you have inquiries, please contact the Department of English at english@cityu.edu.hk.

  1. https://www.cityu.edu.hk/catalogue/ug/current/catalogue/catalogue_UC.htm?page=B/ge_requirement.htm
  2. http://www6.cityu.edu.hk/arro/content.asp?cid=498