Professional Development Seminar (I)
Theme: Ways to Enhance Successful Writing

• Keynote Speech
  
  Professor Donald McQuade
  Vice Chancellor -University, University of California, Berkeley
  
  Raising the Literacy Stakes: Relations Writing Skills and the Demands of the New Economy
  The demands on people to write more quickly and effectively have increased at an unprecedented pace. As a result, writing successfully has become more than a gateway to success in school; it has also become the currency of the new workplace. Yet recent research suggests that at grades 4, 8, and 12 one student in five produces completely unsatisfactory prose, about 50 percent meet "basic" requirements, and only one in five can be called "proficient." By the first year of college, more than 50 percent of first-year students are unable to produce papers relatively free of language errors or to analyze arguments or synthesize information.
  
  Professor McQuade's remarks will focus on practical strategies - and offer principled recommendations to teachers and policy makers - that address the needs of students and teachers to succeed in the information age. Beginning with the premise that "writing is everybody's business," he will suggest that what is needed is not yet another educational cure-all, the latest "innovation" forced upon over-worked teachers, professors, and educational leaders, but a fundamental reformulation of what a society means by learning and how it encourages - and enables - people to develop their full intellectual potential.


• Sharing by 2002 Summer Fellows
  
  1) Ms. Deborah Meech
  Head of the English Department
  China Holiness Church Living Spirit College
  
  Writer's Club - My Students Can Write
  How do you help your students overcome their fear of the blank page? How can you make writing an exercise in personal expression, not drudgery? Young writers will be both comforted and surprised to learn that their favorite teacher uses a writing process similar to their own. I also experience many of the same writing frustrations as my students do! In our Writers’ Club meeting, I share with them my experience as a writer. We also write together, any time, anywhere - writing does not just happen in our English class.
  
  2) Ms. Meimei Chan
  English Teacher
  St. Clare's Girls' School
  
  Let''s Read My Book Together: Writing and Reading Buddy Program
  A writing and reading buddy program was held to mutually benefit students from two partner schools. Students from a secondary school first engaged in a writing program in which they were encouraged to write picture story books in groups. Then they were trained in story telling and other extended reading activities. Subsequently they served as "reading buddies" as they acted as peer teachers who select and read books for their "buddies" in the partner primary school. The highlight of the program was to share books written by themselves with their reading buddies, thus boosting their confidence as writers and readers.
  
  

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