English Remedial Instruction Course for Technical College Students Design and Implementation.docVIP

English Remedial Instruction Course for Technical College Students: Design and Implementation Lin-Mei Pan (潘玲媺) Hsiang-Chun Hung (洪香椿) Ta Hwa Institute of Technology anlinmei@ hchung@.tw This ten-week English remedial instruction course was designed to enhance the capability and motivate learning for the students with low-level English proficiency in a technical college. Effective learning strategies and interesting teaching materials were taught to facilitate students achieving the greatest learning experience in a short time. The participants of the study were 36 volunteer freshmen at a technical college, who were encouraged to take the course offered at the 7th and 8th periods each Wednesday. The pretests and posttests of the achievement test and the questionnaire on perceptions of and attitudes toward English learning were administered to understand students’ English proficiency, learning difficulties and needs at the first and the last week of the course. The findings would be used for adjusting teaching strategies, methods and materials based on participants’ English proficiency. The checklist of implementation effectiveness of English remedial instruction was used to examine the awareness of participants’ learning effectiveness at the end of the course as well. The ultimate goal of the course aims to cultivate the ability of students’ self-study and lifelong learning in English. INTRODUCTION After entering WTO, Taiwan has to encounter critical challenges and impacts from all dimensions through the world, such as culture, politics, and economics; therefore, it is urgent for each Taiwanese to enhance his or her English proficiency to promote international competitiveness. The Ministry of Education (MOE) posed objectives on enhancing technical college students’ English proficiency, which stated that 50% of technical college students are supposed to pass the elementary General English Proficiency Test (GEPT) or the same level English tests authorize