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 in-depth 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 random-effects 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 Genre-basedApproach?
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 Freiburg-LOB 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.
Chinese EFL learners tend to underuse the negative semantic prosodies of fairly,highly, and totally?,overuse the negative semantic prosodies of extremely; and misusethe semantic prosody of terribly. The results also show that some problems exist inChinese learners' use of semantic prosodies of degree adverbs, and the reasons mayinclude their first language transfer, intralingual transfer, and the lack of informationabout the semantic prosody in dictionaries and textbooks.
The study has some implications for English language teaching, vocabularylearning, as well as the textbook and dictionary compiling.
