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Copyright of English Teaching & Learning is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper proposes an Adaptive Fuzzy Neural Agent (AFNA) with a Patch Learning Mechanism and IEEE 1855 Fuzzy Markup Language (FML) for human and machine co-learning. There are three phases of patch learning mechanism embedded in AFNA, including (1) training an initial global model, (2) training a patch model for each identified patch, and (3) updating the global model using the training data that do not fall into any patch. The AFNA can be applied to construct the student and robot co-learning regression model, as well as the regression model for the dataset retrieved from the game of Go. First, students generate human learning data through interactions with handheld devices or robots based on the AFNA in Taiwan and Japan. Then, the AFNA utilizes the student learning data collected in the classroom and the Go game data provided by both Google DeepMind and Facebook AI Research open-source OpenGo to train the Fuzzy Machine-Learning Model. In addition, the trained Fuzzy Machine-Learning Model of AFNA is deployed to the robots to make students and machines co-learn together based on IEEE 1855 FML. The experiments show that the AFNA with Patch Learning Mechanism and Fuzzy Machine-Learning Model can improve the performance of regression model based on the datasets of student learning and Go game. In the future, we hope to apply the AFNA with robots to the other domain areas, embed it with the Artificial Intelligence of Things devices, and introduce it to more teaching fields in various countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of English Teaching & Learning is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of English Teaching & Learning is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In a democratic society students need to cultivate independent and higher-order thought processes, and school curricula should provide students with activities facilitating this. This mode of teaching, however, is not always present in subjects like English as a Foreign or Second Language, where the focus of the instruction tends to be solely on its linguistic attributes. Thus, the researcher conducted an online historical image response project with an attempt to encourage higher-order thinking into the EFL writing course. The wiki was employed as a platform for the researcher's 18 Taiwanese university students to post responses to images for a group of American university students. The study aims to find out what higher-order thinking, if any, the participating students exhibited throughout the process, what transformation, if any, the student final writings exhibited after the implementation of the project, and what the students self-reported about the impact the project had on their thought processing. Various sources of data were collected and analyzed, including the participating students' postings on the wiki, pre-test and post-test essay writings, open-ended retrospective written surveys, and follow-up interviews with five randomly selected students. The findings indicate the following: The students exhibited higher-order thinking, especially evaluation and analysis, in their writings; their final writings displayed more thorough understandings and judgmental opinions toward the historical events than before; in addition to considering the project beneficial to their English learning, the students found it also fostered independent and critical thinking skills. In this paper the researcher reports the theoretical background that guided the construction of the project, the process of the project implementation, and the results of the project on students’ thought processes. In the end, pedagogical suggestions are made based on the findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although content-area courses adopting English-medium (EM) instruction have become more widespread in university-level settings in response to the internationalization of higher education (de Wit, 2002), many operate on the unspoken and inaccurate assumptions that all the students and teachers are capable of learning or teaching content in English (Erling & Hilgendorf, 2006a, 2006b). This paper aims to provide an in-depth understanding of how students, teachers, and administrators perceive the design, implementation, and effectiveness of EM curriculum through a qualitative case study on a university campus in Taiwan. Interviews with three administrators, four teachers, and twenty-four students were conducted. Data were reconstructed and analyzed based on Carspecken's (1996) reconstructive analysis. The findings showed great satisfaction with the socio-cultural aspects of content learning and enhanced English abilities but unanimous concerns over the discipline-specific knowledge and English abilities, rendering unsatisfactory feelings toward the proportional design of the immersion program with the implementation of the English-only policy. The paper, thus, calls for additional attention to EM curriculum design and implementation involving the joint efforts of language and content teachers. Pedagogical implications and directions for future research are also provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The General English Proficiency Test (GEPT), a five-level criterion-referenced test, was developed to assess the general English proficiency of Taiwanese EFL learners. Since its first administration in 2000, the GEPT has won wide recognition, with four million Taiwanese having taken the test. This paper reports on an empirical study of the relationship between self-assessment and test performance. The self-assessment tool, developed in accordance with the test construct in the GEPT, consists of 22 listening and 21 reading can-do statements. Eight thousand and six Taiwanese EFL learners were invited to take a GEPT test and respond to the self-assessment statements. The data were analyzed by Rasch model and ordinal logistic regression. Results show that the self-assessment statements have achieved acceptable accuracy (0.68 for listening; 0.65 for reading) in estimating learners' language levels. The paper concludes that the GEPT self-assessment statements can be considered a useful tool allowing learners to pre-estimate their ability before registering for a GEPT test and therefore recommends that the tool be utilized to enhance learners' awareness of their learning and proficiency, and ultimately encourage autonomous learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of English Teaching & Learning is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of English Teaching & Learning is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In Taiwan, a large portion of Taiwanese undergraduate students in departments of applied foreign languages work in enterprises of different industries after their graduation. In order to increase the competitiveness of these students in the job market, curriculum designs of foreign language education should meet the needs of different industries. To help improve the curriculum design in related departments, this study investigates the uses and needs of foreign languages in Taiwanese enterprises of different industries. Comparing the results of the questionnaire survey of the present study with those reported in another similar survey conducted in 1998 by Shih et al., we find both similarities and differences caused by contextual changes. In addition to the uses and needs of foreign languages, evaluation on the workplace performances of graduates from departments of applied foreign languages by professionals form different industries and the suggestions provided by these professionals will also be discussed in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2001, the MOE has made substantial reforms to Taiwan's K-12 education system, including the release of Curriculum Guidelines that prescribe content and approaches to teaching. These reforms can be seen in light of international trends of reforming education systems to respond to the forces of globalization and to enable students and national workforces for success in the 21st century knowledge economies. Although the MOE Guidelines echo global trends in their call for English language teaching that is more student-centered and 4-skills performance-oriented, they have had little impact on the teaching in most Taiwanese classrooms. This paper attributes the failure of the MOE's implementation of teaching guidelines to the negative washback of high stakes senior high school and college entrance examinations due to their testing role, format and content. However, it is argued that the format and content of these high stakes tests both contribute to and emerge from a cultural, societal and economic context, and that even changing the content of high stakes exams may prove unlikely to realize the successful implementation of educational reforms that are aimed at preparing countries and their citizens for the challenges of the 21st century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese/English Translation has long been an essential part of the curriculum of English Departments in Taiwan. This paper presents an action research of a Chinese-to-English translation class where the instructor tried to address the problem of Chinese students' insufficient knowledge of English discourse by incorporating corpora and text analysis tools into the course. The data collection includes an end-of-course questionnaire and the translation assignments, translator' notes and self-reflection from students' learning portfolio. The results show that corpus resources can enhance students' confidence and performance when translating into a foreign language, while text analysis tools derived from functional linguistics can help students become more aware of the English discourse structure crucial to the development of Chinese-to-English translation competence. Some suggestions are proposed for designing Chinese-to-English translation courses, taking into account the specific challenges students face when translating into their foreign language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]