Learning English is a basic requirement amongst Taiwanese university students. A detailed scrutiny of what activities in an English class are more attractive to this need-to-be productive population would prove very useful to the education authorities. Thus, the current study has focused on the university students’ opinion on the ideal English class. The participants were 446 students from TransWorld University. A 10-item multiple-choice questionnaire based on Littlewood (2010) was the instrument.  The results revealed that girls and boys showed significant differences in their preference for English language activities. However, they had almost equal stand towards usage of language games and emphasis on correct pronunciation. Also, both genders showed the highest interest in a relaxed class atmosphere; and the lowest interest in the usage of smart phones in the class activities. Moreover, EFL-major students shared many common expectations with students of College of Hospitality and Tourism; and the least with the students of College of Management.

Writing is considered one of the most difficult skills in EFL/ESL. Thus, meticulous recognition and classification of students' errors in certain contexts is a worthwhile endeavor which provides us with both diagnostic and prognostic power. Accordingly, a total of 430 students in 15 English writing classes held during 12 consecutive semesters in a private university in central Taiwan were the subjects of this study. They composed 5703 essays which were rated and coded by the authors. Adopting and modifying the error taxonomy proposed by Zheng and Park (2013), the authors classified a sum of 63460 errors into four main groups with their subsequent subcategories. This study revealed that the highest problematic areas for Taiwanese university students were 'misformation' with 51.55% of the whole including errors in tenses, parts of speech, prepositions, subject/verb agreements, and run-on sentences. Then, 'omission' errors ranked second with 21.30% including errors in articles, plural suffix-s, and relative pronouns. Finally, the third and fourth error types were 'others' with 15.13% including spelling, capitalization, and wrong vocabulary, and 'addition' with 12.01% containing errors in articles, unnecessary words, and conjunctions. This study provides numerous genuine samples from the students' compositions being annotated based on the applied error taxonomy. Thus, the data presented in this study can provide researchers with a practical framework for future studies in error analysis, as well as pedagogical implications in the field.

This study was conducted in order to examine the probable differences among the study habits of students on different academic levels: freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors in Taiwanese universities. Thus, 14 departments were randomly chosen in three universities in central Taiwan. In total, 964 respondents were considered in this study. The research instrument was a 24-item questionnaire adopted from the Study Skill Assessment Questionnaire, originally developed by University of Houston Clear Lake, Texas. The questionnaire items used in this study clustered three study habits/skills constructs (eight items each) which were: time management and procrastination, study aids and note-taking, and organizing and processing information. Applying a Pearson Chi-square test (a ≤.05) for each of the 24 items of the questionnaire, it was revealed that there is no significant difference among students of different years with respect to item 4 (preparing a “to do” list), item 18 (breaking assignments into manageable parts), and item 22 (using questions to better organize and understand studying material). As for the other 21 items of the questionnaire, the subjects’ responses varied with a low significance, showing a little difference in study habits among the students of four levels of undergraduate education. Furthermore, and using the rubrics suggested by the original questionnaire developer, it was measured that the lowest score for all of the surveyed constructs was 18.74 (low range) for sophomores on “study aids and note-taking”, while the highest score was 26.26 (medium-high range) for seniors on “organizing and processing information”.

This paper reports the usage of Japanese karaoke films in order to enhance learning Japanese vocabulary among students in a university in Taiwan. A pretest-posttest control-group design was implemented in which the treatment students (55 girls and 48 boys) were given Japanese vocabulary lessons via listening to and watching two karaoke films, while the control group (62 girls and 47 boys) received their Japanese vocabulary lessons through only listening to the same songs (N=212, P ≤ 0.05). The treatment lasted for six consecutive regular general Japanese classes in which the last 20 minutes of the session was allocated to this experiment. The statistical independent samples T-tests used for each of the three comparisons in this study revealed a significant higher gain scores for the girls treatment group, while the boys treatment and control, as well as the general (all) students  treatment and control groups did not show any significant difference. Given the ever-growing usage of karaoke in many countries such as Taiwan, the authors believe that addressing the possible and potential capabilities of such a favorable activity, particularly among the youth, can prove effective and helpful in teaching/learning Japanese and other languages.

This study investigated the effects of Chinese karaoke on recognition and retention of the Chinese characters/words by the Iranian male junior high school learners (N=61, p<.05). In a posttest control group design, students in three English language institutes in Tehran were randomly divided into three groups of Text-only which received the Chinese words via merely a text; Song group which were taught the words via an audio song as well as the text; and finally, Karaoke group which received the words by karaoke, plus the text. The lessons were instructed in two consecutive 20-minute long periods at the end of their routine English classes. The subjects then were tested for their recognition of the 24 Chinese words in question. A One-way ANOVA was run to analyse the scores of the participants. The results revealed that students under Karaoke obtained significantly higher scores as compared to both Text-only and Sound groups. The results, however, did not show any significant difference between the scores of the Text-only and Sound groups. Furthermore, based on the experiment design of this study, this paper advocates consideration of the Arabic writing system as a substitute for the Romanized Pinyin when teaching Chinese to language learners who are familiar with Arabic.