The spread of English as a global language has contributed to the trend of recruiting native English-speaking teachers (NESTs) through government-funded schemes around the world, particularly in East Asia. In Taiwan, the NEST scheme has been recently expanded because of the national policy for a bilingual Taiwan in 2030. However, the NEST scheme…

Intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) are a valuable tool in language learning because they provide opportunities for authentic interaction. However, their effectiveness, compared with that of human interlocutors, in facilitating second and foreign language interaction has not been explored. Therefore, this study investigated the effect of IPAs…

The purpose of this study was to explore native-language teachers' efforts in technology-rich classrooms. The advancement of classroom technology and educational policies in Taiwan prompted native-language teachers to leverage technology that improved learning and instruction in native languages. Fifteen senior teachers participated in in-depth…

Second Language (L2) confidence is considered an affective variable for L2 users to claim ownership of English. However, the findings of previous studies could not be generalized to international students in a non-English-speaking context like Taiwan since English mainly functions as a lingua franca among individuals with diverse first languages.…

In a broader context where English is marketed as a desirable product of consumption, hiring English speakers as language teachers and de facto cultural ambassadors is a common practice in some East Asian countries. This paper investigates how 20 self-identified Asian American teachers in Taiwan teaching English in local schools wrestle with the…

This interview study takes translingual identity as its theoretical framework and a sociocultural linguistic approach as an analytical tool to examine how two Western-educated Taiwanese professors of English writing (Beth and Nita) construct a translingual professional identity. While Beth presented herself as a competent writing instructor beyond…

Co-teaching studies of native English speaking teachers (NESTs) and local English teachers (LETs) have identified numerous factors debilitative to professional collaboration. The aim of this case study is to identify factors facilitative to co-teaching that may lead to more productive avenues of change than continual re-identification of…

In its descriptors for oral fluency the Common European Framework of Reference includes frequent references to the tempo of speech and the use of pausing. The present study aims to provide empirical evidence that these fluency phenomena exist; it also seeks to establish how they distinguish two different levels of proficiency (B2 and C1) among L2…

This autoethnographic study reports on a team-teaching experience in a bilingual education class in Taiwan. For decades, governments in East Asia have promoted team teaching between a native English-speaking teacher (NEST) and a local teacher (LT) in English as a foreign language (EFL) classrooms. These programs are now expanding to include…

English is regarded as a key to globalization or internationalization and future success for Taiwan and its people. One of the most extraordinary results of English-as-the-global-language of English teaching and learning in Taiwan is private English language schools are ubiquitous. Research into how private English language schools weld together…

Despite the increasing popularity of dual language education programs in Taiwan, limited research assesses their effectiveness. This study evaluated eight English Immersion Programs (EIPs) in Taiwan, representing a dual language education model, using the "Guiding Principles for Dual Language Education" (GPDLE) framework. Interviews with…

Drawing on Conversation Analysis, this paper investigates how an English native speaker interviewer utilizes clarification requests as a form of recipient design during an interview to resolve problems of non-understanding. This data is contrasted with interviews between English language learners at a private university in Taiwan. The findings…

The idea that genre-specific reading benefits apprenticing writers is a concept that the field of teaching writing values as an underlying constant. Following this, writing center directors select rhetorics (anthologies of writing exemplars) for their self-access library shelves from the over 200 rhetorics presently in print. To choose these…

Previous studies on spoken word production have shown that native English speakers used phoneme-sized units (e.g., a word-initial phoneme, C) to produce English words, and native Mandarin Chinese speakers employed syllable-sized units (e.g., a word-initial consonant and vowel, CV) as phonological encoding units in Chinese. With spoken word…

Bilingual education is spreading throughout the world as an approach for teaching content and language simultaneously. This is particularly true in Taiwan where implementation of bilingual education has begun as directed by the Blueprint for Developing Taiwan into a Bilingual Nation by 2030. However, the spread of bilingual education is often…