The purpose of the study was to explore undergraduate students' views about environmental futures that are preferred or desirable for them, and to further examine relationships between specific future-related views and general environmental attitudes. 96 students from one reputable public university in Taiwan participated in a survey that included…

The study aims to explore in-service teachers' epistemological beliefs about the following five critical paradigms in second language education and their corresponding practices: (1) inductive/deductive grammar instruction, (2) intensive/extensive reading, (3) looking up unknown words in the dictionary/guessing from context, (4) focusing on…

This study reports on investigating students' English translation performance and their use of reading strategies in an elective English writing course offered to senior students of English as a Foreign Language for 100 minutes per week for 12 weeks. A courseware-implemented instruction combined with a task-based learning approach was adopted.…

The aim of this study was to determine the effects of different types of language tasks performed in Second Life (SL) on the oral performance of beginners of Chinese as a Second Language (CSL), focusing on oral accuracy. The 30 CSL beginners who participated in this study were randomly divided into two groups (n = 15 per group), required to…

This article reports an empirical study investigating L2 acquisition of the Mandarin Chinese "shì…de" cleft construction by adult English-speaking learners within the framework of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere, 2009). A Sentence Completion task, an interpretation task, two Acceptability Judgement tasks, and a felicity…

Personality traits are believed to affect both learner ability and group dynamics and cohesion. Another central element influencing how individuals perform in group settings stems from their motivation to collaborate. This article explores the relationship between personality traits, motivation for collaboration and participation of university…

This study investigated how task-based learning (TBL) developed the verbal competence of Chinese learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) by employing qualitative and quantitative analyses. We compared the impromptu oral presentations on reading texts of 76 intermediate EFL learners given respectively in the beginning and the end of the…

The authors propose an instructional use for Google Earth (a GIS application) as an anchoring tool for knowledge integration. Google Earth can be used to support student explorations of world geography based on Wikipedia articles on earth science and history topics. We asked 66 Taiwanese high-school freshmen to make place marks with explanatory…

An experiment was conducted to examine how different response modes for practice questions and the presence or absence of cues influenced students' self-efficacy beliefs, perceived cognitive load, and performance in language recall and recognition tasks. One hundred fifty-seven 6th grade students were randomly assigned to one of four conditions:…

The study reports on implementing self-developed English for specific purposes (ESP) courseware for technology industries in an elective course, "English reading for technology," offered to junior students of English as a foreign language in a technical university in southern Taiwan. Courseware implementation was combined with a…

The purpose of this study is to apply the technology acceptance model to examine the employees' attitudes and acceptance of electronic learning (e-learning) systems in organisations. This study examines four factors (organisational support, computer self-efficacy, prior experience and task equivocality) that are believed to influence employees'…

Web-based problem-solving, a compound ability of critical thinking, creative thinking, reasoning thinking and information-searching abilities, has been recognised as an important competence for elementary school students. Some researchers have reported the possible correlations between problem-solving competence and information searching ability;…

This study examines the motivation of 20 Japanese students of English as a foreign language (EFL) who chatted electronically with 19 Taiwanese EFL students using online synchronous chat software. In particular, we were interested in four factors that affect task-based motivation: the willingness to communicate, task attractiveness, task…

This study investigated how English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' types of language for thinking and types of oral elicitation tasks influence their lexical collocational errors in speech. Data were collected from 42 English majors in Taiwan using two instruments: (1) 3 oral elicitation tasks and (2) an inner speech questionnaire. The…

After introducing new curriculum guidelines during education reform, the Taiwan Ministry of Education has taken the lead in integrating a communicative approach into the new English language curriculum. Task-based language teaching (TBLT) is viewed as a realisation of communicative language teaching and is one of the most popular English language…