ABSTRACT
This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of Reading to Learn (R2L) methodology in enhancing Chinese descriptive writing skills of non-Chinese Speaking (NCS) students and teaching skills of Chinese teachers. This study involves Secondary 1 NCS students who are beginners in learning Chinese. The students involve two groups: one is the Experimental group, and the other is the Control group. This study focuses on analysing how Chinese teachers adopt R2L methodology to teach NCS secondary school students writing in Chinese. The main research tools in this study are semi-structured interviews with teachers and students and text analysis. Moreover, texts written by these two cohorts of students from the pre-test and post-test have been analysed through the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics, especially “Schematic Structure,” “Transitivity,” “Modality,” “Theme-Rheme Structure” and “Cohesion System,” to evaluate the effectiveness of R2L methodology in improving the writing skills of NCS secondary school students in Hong Kong. The study showed that the students’ post-test essays were much better in the textual organisation and the use of phrases and wordings than their pre-test essays. According to the in-depth interviews with the teacher and students, this study confirmed that R2L methodology helped improve NCS students’ descriptive writing skills.
