A Dissertation by GRACE HUI-CHIN LIN Submitted to the Office of ...

class in their first semester (from August, 2004 to January, 2005). In the class
selected, 3 among 27 students failed their first semester. Therefore, they were not
able to continue studying in the second semester. The number of the participants
totaled 24 students. Most of them were students from the Agriculture College.
The FENM classroom setting was conducted in the Department of Foreign
Language and Literature of Tunghai University in Taichung, the third biggest city of
Taiwan. In this FENM program, besides the abilities of listening, speaking, reading,
and writing, the teaching proportion of communicative competence in this program
was 15%. The scores were evaluated based on a discussion activity in groups of five
during the midterm and the final examination.
The training project was conducted three times a week, and the class meetings
were conducted each Monday and Wednesday afternoon from 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm,
and each Friday afternoon from 2:00 pm to 3:00 pm. Utilizing the time of the
students’ communication and speaking/listening classes in the FENM course, the
trainer spent 20 minutes on teaching the students how to use the strategies from the
very beginning of each class. Simultaneously, the researchers sitting in the corner of
the classroom observed the training process without interrupting the class
proceedings. The training and the data collecting processes were made for 11 weeks,
including 5 weeks of training in the first session, another 5 weeks of training in the
second session, and two interviews each for seven volunteers (14 times of 90-minute
interviews) for one week after 5 weeks and 10 weeks of training.
Sample Selection Criteria
Twenty-four participants who were trained, and a group of seven volunteers
among them, who interviewed, met the following sample set of criteria:
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