Effective citation contributes to the success in master's (MA) thesis writing. The current study investigates cross-disciplinary citation practice in EFL Master's theses. First, the corpus was compiled by collecting 20 Applied Linguistics (AL) and 20 Biology (BIO) MA theses Discussion sections. The forms and rhetorical functions of citations were…

This study examined the effects of students' argumentation standpoints on their argumentation learning in the context of socio-scientific issues (SSIs). To that end, four kinds of argumentation standpoints were defined: affirmative standpoints, oppositional standpoints, multiple standpoints, and non-standpoints. These four kinds of standpoints…

The orientation toward a knowledge-based economy has led to the increasing need to pursue advanced degrees to further improve one's competitiveness in society. Research on postgraduate programs has thus sparked interest from multiple perspectives, among which, generated written artifacts such as dissertations have become the center of attention.…

Drawing on Conversation Analysis, this paper investigates how an English native speaker interviewer utilizes clarification requests as a form of recipient design during an interview to resolve problems of non-understanding. This data is contrasted with interviews between English language learners at a private university in Taiwan. The findings…

This dissertation investigates the effect of linguistic and nonlinguistic variables on the use of spatial representations in bilingual speakers of Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM) and Mandarin Chinese (MC) as compared to monolinguals. Linguists and psychologists are particularly interested in the factors that influence the selection among such…

Collaborative web exploration, in which learners work together to explore the World Wide Web, has become a key learning activity in education contexts. Learners can use a shared computer with a shared display to explore the web together. However, such a shared-computer approach may limit active participation among learners. To address this issue,…

The present study compares the discourse organization in compositions by senior high school students in Taiwan in their Chinese and English classes and explores the influence of their teachers' writing instruction in order to extend the current understanding of students' discourse organization in the school context. The researcher collected data…

This study reports the impact of Recurrent On-Line Synchronous Scientific Argumentation learning on 8th grade students' scientific argumentation ability and conceptual change involving physical science. The control group (N = 76) were recruited to receive conventional instruction whereas the experimental group (N = 74) received the Recurrent…

The study investigates whether the informal interactive written discourse in instant messaging (IM) is permeating the more formal writing of English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) college students, and how students' identities are constructed in terms of English multiliteracies in Taiwan. The study is designed as a qualitative case study. The…

To determine formal principles of discourse processing and production, a study reviewed theories in various disciplines related to language and/or thought and thereby rationalized an approach of quantitative matrix analysis to the problems caused by discrepant discourse structures encountered in second language learning. Statistical analyses of…

This paper compares the processes of Face-To-Face (FTF) teams and Online Learning Teams (OLTs) and proposes methods to improve the performance of OLTs. An empirical study reviewed the performance of fifteen FTF teams and OLTs and their communication patterns were coded by the TEMPO system developed by Futoran et al. (1989) in order to develop a…

A study investigated the communication strategies used by students of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in electronic mail interactions with native speakers of English. Subjects were 22 university students in Taiwan paired with a like number of pre-service EFL teacher trainees in the United States. The discourse of 87 e-mail entries by the…