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Michael Taylor

Sharon Thor of Long Island, New York, is trading an apartment in Manhattan for a flat in Tuen Mun.

'I was originally planning to go home, live with two roommates from college, and work for a law firm as a paralegal,' said the 22-year-old graduate from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

Instead, she will stay in Hong Kong to promote the use of English at Lingnan University.

Under the university's visiting tutors scheme, six recent graduates from partner institutions in the United States and Canada have been recruited to live on campus.

Lingnan requires that undergraduates spend at least two of their three years in student hostels. With about two-thirds of its students living in hostels, it has the largest ratio of students living on campus in Hong Kong.

Visiting tutors are more than teachers' aides. They are expected to help out in the self-access centre or with language tutorials. An important part of their role is to promote the use of English among students in casual situations outside the classroom.  Organisers believe it is the only programme of its type in Hong Kong.

'I'm really excited to actually have a chance to see what a university in Hong Kong is really like,' Ms Thor, whose mother was born in Hong Kong, said.

'I want to be a part of the actual learning experience of young people in Hong Kong,' she said.

Ms Thor, who has just graduated from Trinity College,  was one of 72 students from the United States, Canada, Hong Kong, Taiwan and the mainland to take part in this year's Lee Shiu Summer Institute. They spent one week on the mainland and four  weeks in the SAR.  While in Guangzhou, participants in the seminar stayed at the leafy campus of Zhongshan University.

They visited an insurance company, a family temple, an archaeological site and a performance of Peking Opera.

They then moved on to Huizhou and Shenzhen. There they visited factories, some of them run by Hong Kong entrepreneurs.

In Hong Kong, they took classes in Cantonese, Putonghua or English and attended a series of lectures on topics ranging from Hong Kong cinema and the management of fung shui to e-commerce and the role that corruption plays in Chinese culture.

Visits to the Independent Commission Against Corruption, the Housing Authority, the Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups and Apple Daily  rounded out their stay in the SAR.

Ms Thor was the second Lee Shiu participant to be invited to join the visiting tutors programme.

Tom Greever, who took part in the first institute two years ago, is a marketing and music business major from Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. He has also been selected to take part in the programme this year.

'After I went back to the States I knew I wanted to come back to Hong Kong,' Mr Greever said.

'When I heard about the tutorship programme I thought it would be a good opportunity,' he said.

Lelinh Huynh, a graduate of Canada's York University, took part in the programme last year. Having decided to stay on for another session, she was upbeat about the scheme.

'A lot of the professors are not available to help after hours,' Ms Huynh said. 'The students look at us not only as teachers but also as friends. We also do stuff outside class such as going shopping or to the movies. That motivates  the students to speak English in informal situations,' she said.

According to J Barton Starr, associate vice-president and director of International Programmes, the visiting tutors scheme was just one of four university initiatives that have been established to broaden students' horizons and to promote cross- cultural ties with institutions in other countries.

'As students embrace the world, we believe they will do so with an energy and enthusiasm that will transform their lives,'  Professor Starr said. Other initiatives include the Students International Exchange Programme (SIEP), the Breakthrough Project and the recruitment of full-time students from outside Hong Kong.

Under SIEP, as many as 25 per cent of the university's students will eventually spend at least one semester abroad on a one-to-one exchange basis during their three years at the university.

With careful planning, the credits earned at overseas institutions will count towards gradua tion requirements at Lingnan, which means that students can graduate on time.

Students taking part in exchange programmes at other local universities sometimes have to delay graduation since the courses taken abroad do not always count towards their degree.

The Breakthrough Project - already under way - constitutes a mandatory summer abroad for all English majors between their second and final years.

'We also want to selectively admit a limited number of full-  time students from around the world who will do all three years at Lingnan,' Professor Starr said.

The Lingnan initiatives reflect a growing trend among local universities to foster closer ties with institutions of higher learning on the mainland and overseas.

'When students return from a semester abroad, they are transformed,' a professor at the Hong Kong University of Science Technology observed.

'We will do whatever we can to get as many of our students overseas,' he said.



Lingnan recruits fresh graduates from US and Canada to live on campus to boost English learning