DOI: 10.5716/2251-1814_EeL58
Authors: Hsin-Piao Hsu, Hui-Ying Wu
Abstract:
Teachers play major roles in course planning and decision making (Davies, 2006). The Administration of Education, and more industrial incorporations in Taiwan, use the General English Proficiency Test (GEPT) or other equivalent tests such as the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) to measure an applicant’s qualification for employment and promotion (LTTC, 2007 & ETS, 2010). The purpose of this study is to develop the TOEIC-based after-school English remedial program and apply this program to low-achieving English students in a technical university in Northern Taiwan by using three different teaching media - traditional handouts, kindle e-Book and iPad tablet - in this study to investigate how these three different instructional media affect students’ learning performance and motivation. Thirty-six sophomore English underachievers were divided into three groups and used as subjects. The after-school English remedial program continues for 7 weeks with the same teaching strategies in all three groups. The results indicated that the subjects in these three groups all score better in posttest than pretest. The kindle e-Book and iPad tablet can also be beneficial to students’ learning performance, as long as the technology does not become distracting. Learners who studied with the kindle e-Book and iPad tablet had greater learning reinforcement, and made greater progress in English test scores, than the handout group. Statistically, however, there are no English score differences between kindle the kindle e-Book and iPad groups. The results showed that learners expressed positive viewpoints toward the usage of the kindle e-Book and iPad tablet in the after-school English remedial program and the experience of media integrated learning. Therefore, by means of the integration of instructional technology and media attributes in low-achieving English students, this study made suggestions regarding the adoption of technology for the English remedial program.
Keywords: after-school english remedial program; traditional handouts; kindle e-book; iPad tablet; motivation; performance
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