Gateway Education English
The English Department’s contribution to Gateway Education courses meets three major University requirements:
- Coordinating Gateway Education (GE) English courses for the University
- Maintaining quality assurance in GE English teaching and assessment
- Applying research findings to enhance GE English education
Students must complete two three-credit courses in Gateway Education (GE) English as part of their graduation requirements. The first is GE1401 University English. GE1401 is a general course in rhetoric, composition and argumentation following the US-style “freshman writing” model. The second GE English course is discipline-specific and is designed to meet the needs and interests of students from different colleges and schools.
Research-led expertise in the department helps to maintain the quality of teaching and assessment on all the GE English courses. Working closely with the Language Centre, the English department coordinates these courses, taking the lead on multiple activities with instructors, including developing new pedagogical materials and improving the validity and reliability of assessment via standardization tasks, as well as implementing measures to reduce plagiarism cases. Each year, coordinators propose “summer projects” to address instructors’ concerns regarding issues that relate to quality assurance.
Faculty within the English department also conduct research projects based on the data from GE courses, feeding these research findings back into GE courses. For example, a database of student academic papers has been built with data from four discipline-specific GE English courses. With this database, research projects are being conducted aiming to improve students’ writing skills across these four academic disciplines. Evidence-based materials are then developed to improve teaching and assessment on GE English courses.