Abstract
Since Dewey developed the concept of “critical thinking”, many
scholars abroadhave carried out a series of studies about improving
students' critical thinking skills ineducation field. In the 1980s,critical
thinking became the target of higher educationprograms in such foreign
countries as the US and Canada. It has gained its widespreadattention in
China only in recent years. But there are only few studies about it
ineducation field. Our traditional English teaching method pays much
attention to thetraining of students' linguistic knowledge and language
skills but ignores thecultivation of students' critical thinking abilities. In
the process of skill practice,teachers often stress the importance of
memorizing vocabulary and imitating skillsrigidly,but neglect the students'
abilities in analyzing problems and putting forwardinnovative solutions.
Therefore, English writing teaching is affected by this andmerely attaches
emphasis to train students' reading and writing skills. There are
fewstudies which aim at systematically cultivating students' analysis,
synthesis, summary,comparison and reasoning skills while they are
writing. Therefore,this study aims atdesigning some writings tasks and
teaching strategies which can be used to fostercollege students' critical
thinking awareness and promote students' all-rounddevelopment.
According to six critical thinking skills,this study was carried out by
requiringstudents to hand in an argumentation. All participants in this
study are non-Englishmajor college freshmen from a 211 key university.
The revised version of Rubric forQualitative Critical Thinking Skills
Instrument was used in this study. Withquantitative and qualitative
analysis,writing experiment is conducted within a wholesemester to
collect data concerning students' learning behavior. Reading-to-write
isused in experimental class while traditional method is adopted in
control class. Thewriting scores by the experimental and control class
were statistically processed bysoftware SPSS 19.0. And also the interview
was launched in some of students inexperimental class to assess
students' critical thinking abilities reflected in theirwritings-The final
analysis indicated that EGAP writing model exerted a significantlypositive
influence in improving students' critical thinking skills, especially in
arousingstudents' writing enthusiasm and critical thinking awareness.
Compared with controlclass, students in experimental class made big
progress in writing competence. Inaddition, this study put forward some
reform proposals to the teaching of Englishwriting. The study is of great
value to instruct students to employ critical thinkingskills in their writing.
Abstract
A large body of research has been conducted on the effects of
technology-enhancedEnglish vocabulary learning since the 1960s (Marty,
1981) 。 However, no consensus hasbeen reached yet (Choo, Lin, &
Pandian,2012; Mohsen & Balakumarohsen, 2011)。
Despite the fact that some narrative reviews have evaluated and
explored thesecontradictory results, this study aims at quantifying the
overall effectiveness oftechnology-enhanced English vocabulary learning
with a different approach to review:meta-analysis and performing indepth moderator analyses of learning method and testtype further.
Totally, twenty effect sizes from thirteen pieces of primary research
are obtainedafter collecting related literature published or unpublished in
recent ten years via fourchannels and selecting through three filters.
Later, all the primary research is coded anddata are computed in randomeffects model with software ComprehensiveMeta-Analysis.
Results show that: (1) Technology has a positively large effect on
Englishvocabulary learning according to Cohen's standards as proposed in
1992 (g = 1.26,witha 95% confidential interval of [0.86, 1.66]) 。 (2)
Learning methods (intentional learning,incidental learning, and integrated
learning) have impacts on the overall effectiveness.
Heterogeneity exists in the three learning methods (g = 9.22,p = 0,01
< 0.05) , Effectiveness of intentional learning, incidental learning and
integrated learning is ^ =0.61, g 二 2.14, g = 0.98 respectively. Incidental
learning under technology-enhancedenvironment yields the largest
effectiveness on English vocabulary learning. (3) Testtypes (recognition
tests, recall tests,recognition + recall tests) also have impacts on
theoverall effectiveness. The three test types are heterogeneous as well
{Q = 17.04, p =0.000 < 0.05) 。 Recognition tests, recall tests, and
recognition + recall tests have effectsizes of 3.59,0.71 and 0.37
respectively. Technology-enhanced English vocabularylearning achieves
the largest effectiveness in recognition tests.
Abstract
The present study, which is based on the Competing Values
Framework (i.e. CVF:a framework to identify the organizational
effectiveness and to define organizationalculture) , aims to investigate
English teachers, teaching motivation at universities, theirperception of
the
organizational
culture
in
the
target
university,their
professionalaspiration and how they affect each other. The research
questions to be addressed are asfollows: (1) How do the English teachers
perceive the organizational culture at theirworkplace? (2) How much
effort will the teachers pay for their professionalengagement and
aspiration? (3) What kinds of motivation do the English teachers in
thetarget university appear to have? (4) How will the organizational
culture and theprevious experience affect teachers' motivation?
This study employed four different questionnaires as the research
instruments,including one demographic questionnaire and three research
questionnaires, i.e. thedemographic questionnaire, the Organizational
Culture Assessment Instrument (i.e. theOCAI) (Cameron & Quinn,
1999),the Professional Engagement and CareerDevelopment Aspiration-
scale (i.e. the PECDA-scale) (Watt & Richardson, 2008b) , andthe Work
Tasks Motivation Scale for Teachers Teaching (i.e. the WTMST) (Fernet et
al.,2008) , to investigate the above mentioned research questions. The
whole investigationtook roughly 12 weeks and involved three stages: the
preparation stage,the pilot study,and the main study.
The findings of the present study show that most of the teachers are
intrinsicallymotivated and with identified regulation influenced by the
performance culture and theclan culture which are the dominant culture
types of the target research site. Results alsoindicate that the overseas
experience and length of teaching experience affect teachers'perception
of tixe organizational culture and motivation. The participants who
haveoverseas experience tend to be more with the sense of
professionalism, moreintrinsically motivated and be more confident with
their competence in the academicarea; and the ones who have longer
years of teaching experience are with moreidentified regulation and
introjected motivation and are more committed and moreassured of
staying in the education field. The participants in the target
universitybasically belong to the highly engaged persisters,and the male
teachers expect to be theleadership.
Abstract
Owing to the economic, social and academic needs as well as the
advantages of EGAP(General Academic Purpose in Chinese College
English) itself, there exist 这 great deal ofnecessity and feasibility for
applying English for EGAP class. It is our understanding thatwriting plays
an extremely important role in the course of EGAP and genre is a
quiteinfluential factor in improving students5 writing competency.
However,the investigation ofstudents' current writing situation shows that
being deeply influenced by traditional writingteaching methods which
emphasize grammar and vocabulary; the students have littleknowledge
about genre approach theoretically or systematically and lack the
awareness ofgenre. Because of this,it becomes necessary to put forward
an English writing teachingapproach which is effective as well as
applicable to the situation in China so as to enhancetheir writing
competence.
This paper firstly gives a brief introduction to the developing trend of
EGAP bydiscussing its necessity and applicability in China and the main
views of two schools of genretheory, the tiieoretical foundation and
genre-based approaches of three main schools of genrestudy and
practice. And also,their characteristics are compared and the adaptability
inChinese College EGAP class is analyzed, based on which it puts forward
a modifiedGenre-based approach in EGAP writing class in order to
enhance students' genre awarenessand improve their writing skills.
To achieve this, two non-English major classes of freshmen in East
China University ofScience and Technology (ECUST) have been selected as
the experimental class andcontrolled class, and the research lasts one
semester. The Genre-based approach is applied inthe experimental class
following a modified Genre-based approach. And a comparison hasbeen
made on the same subject at the beginning and the end of the semester
and thecomparison and contrast between the experimental class and
controlled class have also beenmade. Owing to various factors,such as
learning motivation, different students show variedextent of acceptance
to certain teaching approaches. Therefore, emphasis has not only
beenput on the overall changes,but also on the individual differences.
There are three hypotheses:
1. Can Genre-based approach enhance students' genre awareness? 2.
Can “genreawareness” really improve students' writing ability in EGAP?
If the students can get overallimprovement, is there any difference in
gender and the students with diverse learningaptitudes because of the
individual difference? If some students fail to improve, what's thepossible
reason behind it? 3. Will Chinese students accept and adapt to GenrebasedApproach?
Three sets of data from six writing assignments, writing in final-term
examination andquestionnaires are collected and analyzed with the help
of the software SPSS 19.0. And thestudy indicates that: (1) Genre-based
approach has a significant effect in sensitizing students'genre awareness,
improving holistic writing competence; (2) during the whole
experimentalprocess, girls have a stable superiority over boys, however,
boys' improvement fluctuation iscomparatively obvious; (3) students of
medium efficiency have the greatest potential to makebig improvement;
(4) Unavoidably, in this research there are some students who fail to
gainimprovement in terms of writing ability or get changed in terms of
writing notions, andthrough analysis it has been found that the main
objective reasons are: the difficulty ofwriting itself,the differences of
culture and ways of thinking between east and west,thelimited teaching
period, etc.; and subjective reasons mainly come from: the
limitedcompetence of students themselves, the lack of interest in English
writing, etc(5) aoverwhelming majority of students are liable to accept this
approach and able to adapt to itpretty well, yet acceptation is not
absolutely accompanied by adaptation; (6) feedback is adispensable part
in English writing teaching, and more specific feedback will bring
strongermotivation in students' self-correcting and developing;In the
end,the author presents some limitations in her research and hopes that
this cangive some hints and tips to further research in EFL writing classes.
Abstract
In college English listening & speaking classrooms, language and
other semioticsystems cooperate together to help students construct
meaning. It can be reflected inthe design of textbooks and the use of
audios, videos and images, etc. Thus, in thisthesis, the theoretical
foundation is the theory of multimodal discourse analysis (MDA)derived
from Systemic Functional Linguistics and Social Semiotics. The essence
ofMDA is that other semiotic resources such as: images, audios, etc. are
as important aslanguage in the meaning-making system. Visual Grammar,
Acoustical Grammar andthe integrated frameworks of MDA are the main
analysis approaches in this thesis.
Meanwhile, the results of the teaching investigation and the MDA for
textbooksare the practical foundation for the multimodal teaching design,
providing feasibleand effective suggestions in this thesis. According to the
results, it can be concludedthat students have more or less realized
multimodality in this course and argue thatmultimodality should be used
in moderation; multimodal classroom activities, socialcontent, etc. should
be brought into the class; teachers should remind students to
payattention to images, fonts change and other multimodal factors in
textbooks.
Therefore, when conducting the multimodal teaching design,
attention should bepaid to: (1) Modalities influence each other with clear
priorities in this course. (2)Words modality and acoustical modality are
the primary modalities, while othermodalities are just used as tools to
provide supplementary information and to improveteaching efficiency. (3)
The chosen modalities should provide supplementaryinformation to make
the
learning
material
more
easily
understood
and
help
studentsconcentrate. Then, on the basis of the above principles and the
writer's teachingexperience, a sample teaching design has been worked
out, then its' feasibility andeffectiveness have been verified by an
empirical study with the method of interview.
Abstract
Degree adverbs play a crucial role in daily language communication.
However,owing to their wide varieties and similar meanings, it is hard for
language learners toreally master their meanings and usages.
With the aid of AntConc 3.4.lw and based on the corpora of FROWN
(TheFreiburg-Brown Corpus of American English) , FLOB (The FreiburgLOB Corpus ofBritish English) and CLEC (Chinese Learner English
Corpus) , the study aims tocompare the actual use of common English
degree adverbs in terms of semanticprosody between Chinese EFL
learners and native English speakers. The researchprocedures consist of
two steps. First, AntConc 3.4.lw is launched to extractconcordance lines of
the target node words in each corpus and the semantic featuresof the
node words' collocates are analyzed; then, the semantic prosodies of
these nodewords are summarized and comparisons are made between
the two corpora.
The results indicate that there are differences as well as similarities
betweennative English speakers and Chinese learners in their use of
semantic prosody.
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