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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Educ.
Sec. Higher Education
Volume 9 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2024.1395168
This article is part of the Research Topic Foreign Language Teaching and Learning in Chinese Higher Education: Emerging Challenges View all 9 articles

The Perceptions of Undergraduate Students towards Reading Contemporary Fiction in English: A Case Study of Content-based ESL Instruction at a Self-financed Tertiary Institution in Hong Kong

Provisionally accepted
Noble Lo Noble Lo 1,2*Huiwen Shi Huiwen Shi 1
  • 1 College of Professional and Continuing Education, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Hong Kong, SAR China
  • 2 Department of Educational Research, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Lancaster University, Lancaster, England, United Kingdom

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The study explores the effectiveness of teaching English literature to Hong Kong undergraduate students, particularly in a general education course titled "Fiction and Life: Understanding Human Development." This course marked the first exposure for students to book-length fiction in English and critical response written in English, revealing the efficacy of using fictional works as contentbased ESL instruction at the tertiary level in Hong Kong. Employing a mixed-methods approach, the study included questionnaires distributed to 310 students and thematic analysis of semi-structured interview data. Findings indicate a largely positive attitude toward the reading and writing experience, suggesting benefits for ESL teaching and learning in Asia. The study advocates for incorporating English literature into the general education curriculum to foster a more organic and contextualized language acquisition process. This research uniquely contributes to the field by examining student perceptions in a self-financed tertiary institution context, offering new insights that have not been explored before in Hong Kong's ESL landscape.

    Keywords: English education, assessment, Literature, Content-based language instruction, Student perceptions

    Received: 03 Mar 2024; Accepted: 15 Jul 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Lo and Shi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Noble Lo, College of Professional and Continuing Education, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Hong Kong, SAR China

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