the effectiveness of using ''reading to learn, learning to write'' pedagogy in teaching chinese to non-chinese speaking students in hong kong

This paper examines the effectiveness of 'reading to learn' (r2l) pedagogy (rose & martin, 2012) in teaching chinese to non-chinese speaking students in hong kong. junior secondary students were taught to read and write texts of different genres in chinese in an after-hour class for a year using the r2l pedagogy. students were asked to write a composition before and after each genre teaching cycle. during the teaching cycle, teachers scaffolded students' writing through preparing for reading, detailed reading, joint re-writing, sentence-making, and joint construction. this paper selects writings from students representing the low, medium and high achievers. their pre- and post-teaching scripts are analyzed for aspects of transitivity, modality, and cohesion using a systemic functional linguistic (halliday & matthiessen, 2004) framework. semi-structured interviews were conducted to reveal students' perceptions and teachers' reflections on r2l pedagogy. text analysis of the pre- and post-teaching writing suggests that students with different learning abilities are capable of composing much longer and better organized texts with genre-based schematic structure and diversified lexicogrammatical resources after experiencing r2l pedagogy. it is hoped that the findings can provide information to improve the teaching of chinese as a second language for non-chinese speaking students in hong kong.