Enhancing Students’ Communicative Competence through Podcasting

As schools and universities invest more in technology-enhanced learning, podcasts have become an integral part of this pedagogical change. Podcasts can be used as authentic materials to engage students as well as to improve teaching and learning practice. Consequently, education researchers and practitioners alike have highlighted the benefits of incorporating podcasts in the classroom to improve students' language skills, particularly listening and speaking. Inspired by this trend, our Digital Literacy Team at the Centre for Applied English Studies in HKU applied for the Virtual Teaching and Learning Grant last year and received a sum of HK$ 1,000,000 for a project titled 'Expanding student-teacher engagement to support digital media production needs of teachers in virtual teaching and learning environments'. As one of the deliverables of this project, a new elective course in podcasting has been designed for undergraduate students. The main goal of this course is for students to gain communicative competence through the process of producing a podcast suitable for their chosen audience. It is expected that students will improve their English language skills (through script/commentary writing, and interviewing guests and engaging in dialogue with them) while simultaneously developing their ability to communicate through a critical digital medium. As a result of this digital literacy, students who take the course could potentially be recruited to help out with related digital initiatives at the University, thereby providing a stronger infrastructure for sustaining and expanding the role of 'Students as Partners', a notion that has gained much momentum in higher education globally. In this talk, I will outline the different steps we've taken towards the completion of the project thus far, elaborate on our vision of creating this course on podcasting, and share our insights on the extent to which students' communicative and digital expertise can be improved, and the degree to which the course can technically enable them to act in the capacity of partners, alongside teachers, in various digital endeavors at the University.