Ability grouping, organizing classes homogeneously by L2 proficiency, has been commonly used in Taiwanese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes. This quasi-experimental (within-subjects design) study examined proficiency gains of 785 Taiwanese university students over three years enrolled in a general English (GE) program that employed…

Washback refers to the influence of tests on learning and teaching. To date, a number of studies have revealed that tests affect teaching content, course design, and classroom practices. However, in Asian higher education contexts, little research has examined the washback of proficiency tests on English learning in comparison with the efforts on…

The Revised Preschool Language Assessment (RPLA) is a standardized measure for examining the language status of and determining potential language difficulties among preschoolers between 3 and 6 years old. To facilitate the applicability of the RPLA for use with Mandarin-speaking children, the present study adopted exploratory factor analysis…

Background: Having been influenced by the trend of internationalization of higher education, most universities in Taiwan have implemented an English benchmark requirement for graduation, which requires students to demonstrate their English ability at a specified Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) level through taking a…

With the goal of enhancing the competitiveness of students in the workplace, nearly two-thirds of technical universities in Taiwan have adopted a variety of standardized English proficiency tests as exit requirements, including the widespread use of TOEIC. However, employers still name "insufficient English proficiency" as one of the…

At an international school in Taiwan, English learners have struggled to meet the U.S. national average in vocabulary on standardized testing instruments. This problem has become more significant since 2009. The purpose of this research was to conduct a case study on successful vocabulary teachers to determine their perceptions of effective…

English education in Taiwan has experienced a number of modifications over the past decade. The Ministry of Education (MOE) has initiated several reforms since 1994 with a purpose of changing the pedagogy, focusing on grammar-translation, to a more communicative one aim at cultivating learners of greater communication proficiency for the demands…

Current educational policy promotes the use of evidence-based practices to maximize children's learning outcomes. With the goal of enhancing a child's ability to learn functional language, the purpose of this study was to focus on involving families through the utilization of evidence-based intervention based upon the Applied Behaviour Analysis…

This paper reports the compilation of a corpus of Taiwanese students' spoken English, which is one of the sub-corpora of the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) (Gilquin, De Cock, & Granger, 2010). LINDSEI is one of the largest corpora of learner speech. The compilation process follows the design criteria…

In much of the world, the issue of accountability and measurement of educational outcomes is highly controversial. Exit testing is part of the movement to ascertain what students have learned and hold institutions and teachers to account. However, compared to the large number of teacher washback studies, learner washback research is lacking…

This one-year study explores the possibility of integrating critical pedagogy into undergraduate English writing classes in Taiwan. The participants were the students in 2 first-year writing classes taught by the researcher. For these classes, I reinvented Freire's (2000) pedagogy of the oppressed, which emphasizes problem-posing, dialogue, and…

The research presented here involved a one-semester study; during this period of time, reading comprehension instruction representing three major discussion-centered approaches (Book Club, BC; Literature Circles, LC; Instructional Conversations, IC) was designed and implemented. The effectiveness of the three experimental approaches and one…

Research has shown that English as a foreign language (EFL) learners in Taiwan fall into two peaks of the curve. This is to say, learners can be classified into two major groups: those who perform quite well on standardized tests, such as college entrance examinations, and those who perform poorly. From a socioeconomic perspective, the correlation…

Oral reading fluency is an indicator of overall reading competence. Many studies have claimed that repeated reading can promote oral reading fluency. Currently, novel Web- or computer-based reading technologies offer interactive digital materials that promote English oral reading fluency using the repeated reading strategy; however, paper-based…

The adoption of standardised English Language Proficiency (ELP) tests as a tool for assessing students' English competence for graduation is becoming more and more common in higher education in Taiwan. This paper focuses on university undergraduate students and uses data from a questionnaire survey to investigate their views of the application of…