Teaching Freshman Composition and Creative Writing to Students at a Hong Kong University and Implications in Developing Academic Literacy

The study aims to provide a deeper understanding of students’ perspective on various types of writing assignments in a Freshman composition course and the difficulties they experienced in fulfilling the task requirements. It provides insight in course materials design to better address both their reading and writing needs. A freshman English composition course is provided as part of a GE (General Education) curriculum for all freshmen in a Hong Kong university. Students on the course are introduced to various writing genres (descriptive, narrative, and analytical) with relevant reading texts being integrated as input materials. Students are required to engage in frequent writing assignments. On-going feedback has been collected from students on the level of difficulty of assignments and relevance of reading texts in enhancing interest and understanding of the genre and discourse structure. Four classes of students were invited to complete a questionnaire to collect both quantitative and qualitative feedback on each writing assignment and the assigned reading materials. Results show that a majority of students found writing which required elements of creativity and originality (descriptive, narrative, and proposal-argument) to be the most challenging. Interestingly, a sizable number identified this challenge as motivational in improving their creative thinking and quality of writing. Further analysis on the students’ writing experience suggests that an emphasis on formulaic and over-structured writing in the Hong Kong education curriculum may limit students’ ability to truly develop their creativity and academic literacy.