SEC’s Professor Chiu Ming Ming has won a HK$22M grant from the from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of English Language Acquisition.
The US expects new immigrants to learn English. However, language programmes for such learners are difficult to organize as non-native parents often lack the language and teaching skills needed to teach them, while native teachers lack their non-native language skills and cultural knowledge.
With this in mind, Prof Chiu’s course Parental Inclusion in Language and Research (PILAR) , trains elementary classroom teachers to work with parents to help one another use oral language with and among their English learners to help them learn both English and other academic content. The project brings together teachers and parents to improve mutual understanding and student learning, by aligning their adult skills and learning activities at home and school.
Professor Chiu Ming Ming, Chair Professor of Analytics and Diversity, will design the teacher-parent conversations and analyze them with a statistical method that he invented - statistical discourse analysis. The project will enhance the oral language performances of English learners in the classroom and their speaking, listening, and reading comprehension on the annual English language proficiency test.
