Browsing by Author "Sun, Yu-Chih"

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BLOGGING TO LEARN: BECOMING EFL ACADEMIC WRITERS THROUGH COLLABORATIVE DIALOGUES
(2012-02-01)
Sun, Yu-Chih
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Chang, Yu-jung
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英語教學研究所
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Institute of Teaching English to speakers of other Languages
This study examines how blogs and their interactive and collaborative features help academically-advanced graduate students process academic writing knowledge and make sense of their writer identity. Seven graduate students undertaking Master's level study in TESOL and Linguistics participated. The research questions are: (a) What kinds of writing-related topics do students blog about? (b) How do students' collaborative dialogues on blogs help them process and reconstruct knowledge about academic writing? (c) How do students' collaborative dialogues on blogs facilitate their negotiation of academic identities and construction of authorship? Open-coding and content analysis were conducted to inductively identify salient themes and patterns regarding students' learning and perception of their writer identities. The results suggest that the blog activity not only encourages students to actively and reflectively engage in knowledge sharing, knowledge generation, and the development of numerous strategies to cope with difficulties encountered in the learning process. Blogs also endow students with a sense of authorship as the writers of blog entries and, at the same time, provide a space for them to sort out what being an author entails, their purposes of writing, and their authority in writing.
Developing reflective cyber communities in the blogosphere: a case study in Taiwan higher education
(2010)
Sun, Yu-Chih
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英語教學研究所
;
Institute of Teaching English to speakers of other Languages
The purpose of this study is to highlight the possibilities and challenges that underlie efforts to integrate blogs into teacher-education programs in Taiwan higher education. The participants were 12 pre-service teachers undertaking Master's level study in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. The outcomes of the blogging project were highlighted in terms of pre-teachers' professional development on the blogs, their difficulties encountered, problem-solving strategies employed, and the students' perception of blogging. The results suggested that blogging could encourage pre-service teachers to actively and reflectively engage in knowledge sharing, knowledge transformation, and knowledge generation. Blogging also encouraged the development of numerous strategies to cope with difficulties encountered in the blogging process. Overall, pre-service teachers held positive attitudes toward blogging as a support for their professional development and were conscious of audience considerations, and so tended to select and respond to blog content deemed interesting and useful to their audience.
Do journal authors plagiarize? Using plagiarism detection software to uncover matching text across disciplines
(2013-12-01)
Sun, Yu-Chih
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英語教學研究所
;
Institute of Teaching English to speakers of other Languages
The current study aims to explore the extent of matching text in published journal articles and how the number of authors and their various official languages influence the extent to which matching text appears. Six hundred journal articles in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) and Social Science were randomly selected and screened by both plagiarism detection software (Turnitin) and human raters(s). The results indicate that disciplinary differences do exist in terms of the degree of matching text incidences. Journal articles in STEM tend to contain significantly more consecutive matching text from other sources than Social Science journal articles. However, it is not clear if this is discipline dependent. In addition, authors tended to have more consecutive text copied from their own previously published works than that of others' publications. Furthermore, the greater the number of authors an article has the more consecutive text-matching can be observed in their published works. Additionally, authors located in contexts wherein English is an official language do not differ significantly from those in contexts wherein English is not an official language on their Turnitin scores and the number of 30-word or longer strings of consecutive matching text from self-published articles and self-and-others' publications combined. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Does Text Readability Matter? A Study of Paraphrasing and Plagiarism in English as a Foreign Language Writing Context
(2012-07-01)
Sun, Yu-Chih
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交大名義發表
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National Chiao Tung University
"Academic plagiarism and inappropriate source borrowing have drawn much attention in higher education in recent years. Research has shown that reasons behind students' textual transgression include lack of knowledge about plagiarism and paraphrasing, task/text difficulty, and topical familiarity. Little has been done to probe into the relationship between source text readability and paraphrasing. The study aims to explore if text readability has an influence on the extent of student writers' paraphrasing, plagiarism, and their strategy use. The participants of the study were 97 college students taking academic writing courses in Taiwan. This study employed one specially developed instrument that includes a plagiarism knowledge survey, a perception survey, and two paraphrasing tasks with low-and high-readability texts. The results showed that students tended to do more substantial paraphrasing from the high-readability text than from the low-readability text. Also, incidences of potential plagiarism such as exact copying and near copying appeared to be higher for the low-readability text than the high-readability text."
Extensive writing in foreign-language classrooms: a blogging approach
(2010)
Sun, Yu-Chih
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英語教學研究所
;
Institute of Teaching English to speakers of other Languages
A weblog (blog or Web log) has recently become one of the most widely used Internet applications. The current study concerns developing a blog specifically designed for learners learning English as a foreign language. The study investigated the effects of extensive writing by comparing the writing performance in the first three and the last three blog entries written by the participants. The study also conducted a survey to examine participants' blogging process and their perception of blogging. The results of the study show that writing on blogs could enhance participants' overall writing performance, promote participants' autonomous monitoring of their own writing, and promote positive attitudes toward foreign-language writing. From its findings, the study concluded that writing weblogs in an online environment could be beneficial in improving learners' writing skills, enhance learners' motivation to write, and foster both learners' monitoring strategies and learner autonomy.
I help, therefore, I learn: service learning on Web 2.0 in an EFL speaking class
(2015-05-04)
Sun, Yu-Chih
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Yang, Fang-Ying
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英語教學研究所
;
Institute of Teaching English to speakers of other Languages
The present study integrates service learning into English as a Foreign Language (EFL) speaking class using Web 2.0 tools - YouTube and Facebook - as platforms. Fourteen undergraduate students participated in the study. The purpose of the service-learning project was to link service learning with oral communication training in an EFL speaking class by having each student create two YouTube videos in which they made informative presentations about the university (e.g., transportation system) and the city (e.g., sightseeing spots) in English to international students on campus. A Facebook community was established as a forum for students to share their videos with the international students and peers. The results suggest that the project enhanced EFL students\' public speaking-related skills (e.g., idea and content development, and pronunciation), built their confidence in speaking English, and allowed them to develop their own learning process and strategies. Moreover, Web 2.0 tools endow service learning with new possibilities of reaching a greater number of the target audience and provide the members of the community with alternative means of communication.
Is what I need what I want? Reconceptualising college students' needs in English courses for general and specific/academic purposes
(2011-12-01)
Liu, Jin-Yu
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Chang, Yu-Jung
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Yang, Fang-Ying
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Sun, Yu-Chih
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英語教學研究所
The purpose of the study is to explore English as a foreign language (EFL) college students' needs in English for General Purposes (EGP) and English for Specific/Academic Purposes (ESP/EAP) courses in terms of their perceptions of three subcategories of needs-necessities, wants, and lacks-and reasons for students' course enrollment. A questionnaire was administered to 972 EFL college students from six universities in Taiwan. The results showed that students had different perceptions of necessities, wants, and lacks in the different language skills taught in EGP and ESP/EAP courses. The findings also demonstrated discrepancies between the students' perceptions of needs and the actual courses they took, thereby highlighting the importance of understanding needs as a complex, multiple, and conflicting concept. Finally, factors that determined students' enrollment in EGP courses included necessities, short-term, and long-term goals while enrollment in ESP/EAP courses depended more on job relevancy. Implications for language instructors and curriculum designers are discussed. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
It is more than knowledge seeking: examining the effects of OpenCourseWare lectures on vocabulary acquisition in English as a foreign language (EFL) context
(2013-02-01)
Yang, Hui-Chi
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Sun, Yu-Chih
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英語教學研究所
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Institute of Teaching English to speakers of other Languages
OpenCourseWare (OCW) has received increasing attention over the past few years in higher education. These courses provide appealing opportunities to view classes taught in well-established universities worldwide. The current study aims to examine how OCW lectures can serve as authentic learning materials to facilitate vocabulary acquisition for learners learning English as a foreign language (EFL). It further investigates factors that influence the effectiveness of vocabulary acquisition via OCW lectures. Three open-course lectures from MIT and Yale University, on psychology, physics, and music, were selected. Sixty-five Taiwanese college students participated in the study. The results of pre- and post-testing indicate that learners were able to gain L2 vocabulary knowledge by simply viewing an OCW lecture once. Level of vocabulary (academic vocabulary, technical vocabulary and low-frequency vocabulary) was found to be the most influential factor affecting vocabulary acquisition through OCW lectures. In addition, learners improved more on technical words than on academic ones. Verbal elaboration was also an important factor affecting vocabulary acquisition; the more explicit the elaboration is the greater the vocabulary gain. Frequency of occurrence, on the other hand, had positive but relatively small effects on learners' vocabulary gain.
Scaffolding and web concordancers as support for language learning
(2009)
Chang, Wen-Li
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Sun, Yu-Chih
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語言教學與研究中心
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Language Teaching and Research Center
The present study investigates the effects of scaffolding and web concordancers on students' proofreading performance. The study addresses the following research questions: (1) How does a concordancer search enhance students' proofreading performance? (2) How does scaffolding for concordancer searches enhance students' proofreading performance? (3) Does scaffolding have a lasting effect on students' concordance-assisted proofreading performance? (4) Does scaffolding affect students' level of certainty about their proofreading performance? (5) What are the students' perceptions of the effects of the web concordancer and scaffolding? A class of 26 senior high school students in Taiwan participated in this study. The results of the present study showed significant improvement in students' proofreading performance with the support of concordancer searches. Proofreading scores of the scaffolding group were significantly higher than the scores of the non-scaffolding group, and this improvement appeared to remain after the removal of scaffolding. Moreover, the prompts boosted the students' level of certainty about their performance in proofreading tasks. As for the results of the study's questionnaire survey, the students' responses suggested an overall favorable perception.
Uncovering published authors\' text-borrowing practices: Paraphrasing strategies, sources, and self-plagiarism
(2015-12-01)
Sun, Yu-Chih
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Yang, Fang-Ying
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英語教學研究所
;
Institute of Teaching English to speakers of other Languages
The study aims to examine the paraphrasing strategies, sources, and self-plagiarism of 71 journal articles in the fields of language and education. Turnitin plagiarism detection software and human scrutiny were employed to uncover the full range of detectable text-borrowing practices in these publications. The results indicate 30 different types of paraphrasing strategies, among which copying verbatim and substitution were the most frequent. Additionally, authors in the study often integrated multiple paraphrasing strategies within single sentences. Journal articles represent the majority of the sources from which text is borrowed. Regarding authorship, overall, more than two-thirds (67.28%) of the observed textual borrowing involves the reuse (or recycling) of texts from an author\'s previous publications. The prevalence of matches with one\'s own publications calls for more explicit operational standards among disciplines in this regard and points toward factors that may contribute to unintentional self-plagiarism, such as lexical bundles or authors\' stylistic habits in writing. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Using a two-tier test in examining Taiwan graduate students' perspectives on paraphrasing strategies
(2009-09-01)
Sun, Yu-Chih
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語言教學與研究中心
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Language Teaching and Research Center
This study examines Taiwanese English as a foreign language (EFL) graduate students' perspectives on paraphrasing strategies. A two-layer scenario survey was developed to identify the reasoning behind students' judgments that certain paraphrasing is appropriate or inappropriate. The first-layer scenario survey is in a true-false format that consists of nine paraphrasing scenarios and that served to elicit from students their declarative knowledge of appropriate paraphrasing strategies. The second-layer scenario survey is in an open-ended question format that explores students' explanatory knowledge underlying their first-layer choices. In addition, an attitude survey and a demographic survey were designed and implemented to explore learner variables in relation to the learners' perspectives on paraphrasing strategies. A total of 141 EFL graduate students participated in the study. The results shed considerable light on students' diverse perceptions and reasoning regarding paraphrasing strategies. More than half of the students considered surface-level paraphrasing (patchwriting) to be acceptable strategy use. Significant correlation was found between students' responses to the acceptability of paraphrasing strategies and the following factors: (1) perceived difficulty in paraphrasing, (2) perceived value of appropriate source use, (3) perceived competence in overcoming the temptation to plagiarize, (4) perceived disadvantage as a foreign-language learner with paraphrasing, (5) gender, and (6) paraphrasing-related training. Pedagogical implications of the results are discussed.
VOICE BLOG: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY OF LANGUAGE LEARNING
(2009-06-01)
Sun, Yu-Chih
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英語教學研究所
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Institute of Teaching English to speakers of other Languages
This study uses voice blogs as a platform for an extensive study of language learners' speaking skills. To triangulate the findings, the study collected data by surveying the learners' blogging processes, investigating learning strategies, and conducting retrospective interviews. The results revealed that students (a) developed a series of blogging stages, including conceptualizing, brainstorming, articulation, monitoring, and evaluating, and used a wide variety of strategies to cope with blogging-related difficulties, and (b) perceived blogging as a means of learning, self-presentation, information exchange, and social networking. Findings suggest that blogs can constitute a dynamic forum that fosters extensive practice, learning motivation, authorship, and development of learning strategies.
When technology speaks language: an evaluation of course management systems used in a language learning context
(2010-09-01)
Yu, Wen-Kai
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Sun, Yu-Chih
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Chang, Yu-Jung
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英語教學研究所
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Institute of Teaching English to speakers of other Languages
In light of the growing popularity of the use of computer management systems (CMSs) in higher education today, this study critically evaluates CMS adoption through a content-specific lens. By employing a mixed-method approach, the study examines college teachers' and students' experiences and perceptions of CMS adoption for language learning and teaching purposes. The findings show that despite the users' perceived advantages of using CMSs in language courses, the systems' lack of content-area specificity undermines many of the potential benefits. The study calls for better-rounded professional training to assist language teachers in integrating CMS functions strategically into their disciplinary pedagogy and incorporating multimedia language resources selectively to maximize the benefit of CMSs. Furthermore, the findings demonstrate the importance of developing content-specific CMSs with functions tailored toward pedagogical needs in different contexts.