Two E-learning Projects for Quality of Higher Education in Taiwan ROC: Corpus-Based General and Academic English Learning Environments

In 2002, English learning for Academic Purposes (EAP) was among the urgent agendas of e-learning for Taiwan, ROC, while general college English instruction was also under reform at National Tsing Hua University and several others in the same country. To respond to the call for proposals on e-Learning in Taiwan, an innovative project for general English education and another project for academic writing are reported in this paper. The two multi-year collaborative projects have (a) incorporated advanced digital technologies for English education, and new pedagogies as preparation and design of online digital content, (b) promoted their use and dissemination of the projects ’ results to quite a few students, and (c) conducted evaluation research on their effects in real English classrooms by infusing the e-learning environments into various courses at Tsing Hua, the other AEARU university, and other universities in the island. Maximized use of a corpus is the main feature of the two projects. Tools by a team of Natural Language Processing (NLP) professors, and a speech recognition engine, and e-learning management platforms such as MOODLE are among the technologies that were adopted. The 3-year general English project used corpus and advanced e-learning instructional design to provide computational scaffolding features to help college freshmen or senior high learners improve their English efficiently and effectively (se