The purpose of this study is to demonstrate how to integrate two in-house specialized corpora into a university-level English for Specific Purposes (ESP) course for nonnative speakers of English. The ESP course was an introductory level of wine tasting for Applied English Department students at a university specializing in hospitality in Taiwan. Two corpora of wine tasting notes selected from the official website of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) in Canada, one for red wine and one for white wine, were compiled. Lexical density and vocabulary compositions were analyzed. The results show that the lexical density and the percentages of specialized vocabulary of the wine corpora were higher than in other disciplines. In addition, wine reviewers used different vocabulary to describe the characteristics of white wine and red wine. From the keyword analysis, terms related to cooking methods and food names appeared in high frequencies. Based on the corpora analysis results, vocabulary lists, the LCBO website, and the in-house corpora were introduced to the students as supplementary materials. The pre-and posttest results for vocabulary indicate that the students enrolled in this program gained significant progress in both content and language knowledge. Based on the study results, recommendations for ESP teaching and materials development are discussed.
<p>The purpose of this study is to find practical implications for improving academic writing curriculum design by exploring lexical and grammatical errors produced by EFL learners in a vocational institution in Taiwan. To satisfy this purpose, a small learner corpus was compiled in this study. The data were obtained from 58 undergraduate students of a public vocational university from September 2012 to June 2013 in Taiwan. There are 112 essays in the corpus that include 34,426 tokens. Learner errors were annotated based on the error categories found in (Dagneaux et al, 1996). Transfer errors and intralingual errors were analyzed. Lexical Tutor and AntConc software were used to conduct the analyses. Lexical errors, including incorrect word choices, misspellings, and word insertions, deletions or replacements occurred primarily due to students’ insufficient mastery of vocabulary. The top three grammatical errors were verb forms, article errors, and preposition errors. Based on the research results, pedagogical implications that focus on teaching EAP writing to vocational university students in Taiwan are discussed.</p>
The purpose of this research is to examine the effects of prior exposure on restaurant menu-product sales. Several experiments were conducted to investigate how prior-exposure menu presentation affects memory processes in two types of choice situations (memory-based and stimulus-based) and how prior exposure on restaurant menu-item sales affects consumer attitude.The results indicate that memory-based choices benefit from the prior-exposure menu and are enhanced by conceptually driven memory. Stimulus-based choices benefit from prior exposure and are enhanced by perceptually driven memory. Appropriate prior-exposure menu increases product sales; however, consumers were not willing to purchase the items. Suggestions for restaurant marketers/managers are proposed in this article.
By analysing the national data from the Junior Survey of the Taiwan Higher Education Dataset, this study identified significant variables influencing the educational aspirations of aboriginal students at technical and vocational institutions. The study shows that several variables are predictive of the educational aspirations of aboriginal students. Institutional types, more weekly hours of lessons, more time spent on assignment preparation and revision, a higher maternal educational level, a higher GPA, a keen participation in autonomous, academic, or extramural club activities, and a higher self-rating of interpersonal skills are all associated with higher educational aspirations. In contrast, being a female student and a keen participant in musical and sports club activities are associated with lower educational aspirations. Recommendations to improve Taiwanese aboriginal students' educational aspirations are discussed.
In this study, similarities and differences among generic structures in 80 cover letters written by Taiwanese and Canadian college students were investigated, adopting Upton and Connor’s (2001) framework. The results demonstrated that Canadian students tend to write longer letters, use a greater variety of word types and sentence structures, and choose more professional words than do Tai- wanese students. From the moves-based analysis results, the study revealed that to achieve the main communicative purpose of a cover letter, which is to be con- tacted for an interview, the Canadians employed lengthy sentences and various strategies to demonstrate their qualifications. By contrast, Taiwanese students employed different communicative elements, including direct strategies to ex- press their desire for an interview and uses of formulaic expressions that were not observed in the Canadian corpus. The research findings suggest that the move- structural and rhetorical differences are due to writers’ differences in cultural backgrounds and their rhetorical and lexical knowledge of the particular genre. The results of this study provide implications for teaching English for specific purposes to nonnative speakers.
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