| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中山大學 === 教育研究所 === 88 === The lack of a real English environment in Taiwan and big class teaching had long limited the opportunities for Taiwanese English learners to use English. Due to thriving development of internet technology in recent years, the predicament has been broken through. Internet not only opens a new communicational channel for teachers and students, but also creates an authentic environment for English learners. As the new curriculum policy “coherence curriculum of civil education”, which emphasizes on setting information instruction into each subjects, is taken into practice, learning English with internet tools must will become a trend in the future. Therefore, this research examines the distance between the ideal and the reality using an internet-based English teaching project, and probe into some feasible ways to conduct similar program in the future. There were four purposes of this research:
1. To find out the key factors of success in internet-based English teaching from relative theories and former researches.
2. To understand the teacher’s and students’ performances and the students’ reflections during the first half year joining an internet-based English teaching project.
3. To probe into the merits and defects of the internet-based English teaching project, AJET.
4. To discover the difficulties and feasible ways for senior high schools to carry out internet-based English teaching.
The subjects of this research were a senior high school class and their teacher who first joined an internet-based English teaching project named “Advanced Joint English Teaching” (AJET) in Kaohsiung. All 44 students were male. During the research period, they participated in six internet-based teaching activities, which were “group e-mailing,” “web-based course,” “e-mail writing program,” “English homepage design,” “video conference” and “chatroom discussion.” The researcher traced the students’ performances and collected their work pieces mainly through e-mail, AJET homepage and telephone during the research period.
A questionnaire was given to elicit relevant information on the participants’ perception of, and attitudes towards, using the internet technology to complete their Internet-based English projects. Follow-up interview with 10 students and 2 teachers were also collected at the end of the research to understand their reflections on the project. In addition, the students’ performances at the second homepage contest were also recorded.
After data collection, the quantitative and qualitative methods were performed. The quantitative statistic analysis was employed using descriptive analysis to investigate the learners’ perceptions towards the Web-based project. The qualitative analysis made from the student responses to the open-ended questions and the researcher’s observation, provided the opportunity to uncover deeper issues than might have been apparent in a quantitative study. Students’ responses to the open-ended questions were broken down into excerpts, where each excerpt represented one complete answer to a question, including any follow-up questions or clarification by student interviews.
The main findings and conclusions of this research are as follows:
1. The students’ participation and interaction were not good, and need the teacher’s supervision to help them to form active learning habits.
2. The teacher was overloaded in the project and found it difficult to do both administration and teaching. There is a need of others’ coordination.
3. The students liked and approved of English learning through internet, but differed in their opinions about its benefits to English learning.
4. The project provided the students an opportunity to experience new technologies, felt the pleasure of learning and increased their learning possibilities.
5. To carry out an internet-based English project, the project must spread relative concepts, consider the teacher’s and students’ loads, design each activity with proper number of participants, conduct relative training, and enhance the equipment and communicational efficiency.
To sum up, although there is a distance between the ideal and the reality in the internet-based English teaching project, this way of English teaching is worth developing and expanding. Finally, according to the findings of this research, the researcher provides some suggestions for future organizations, teachers and researchers who are interested in this field.
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