Using ‘Reading to Learn, Learning to Write’ (R2L) Pedagogy to Teach Explanation Genre to Non-Chinese Speaking Students in Hong Kong

The previous chapter has explored the writing needs of non-Chinese speaking (NCS) students learning Chinese as a second language (CSL). Based on text analysis, the students’ writing difficulties at word level, sentence level and whole text level have been identified by examining students with different levels of learning ability. In order to provide pedagogical support to cope with the students’ learning needs, this chapter introduces the “Reading to Learn, Learning to Write” (R2L) Pedagogy, explains its theoretical underpinning, and illustrates how this pedagogy can be applied in daily CSL classroom teaching. In the form of a case study which involves classroom observation, interviews and text analysis, the chapter aims to describe how R2L Pedagogy which can provide students with all-round support was applied in a Chinese second language writing class dealing with the explanation genre, and to evaluate the effectiveness of the R2L Pedagogy on enhancing the writing ability of NCS students. Through integration of reading and writing, the R2L pedagogy provided students with abundant support in language input and output. The research results indicated that NCS students showed great improvements in writing after R2L teaching.