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Bridging EFL with ESP via English as a Lingua Franca: A Virtual Exchange Course Developed for Nursing Junior College Students in Post Pandemic Era

Virtual exchange (VE) refers to the practices in which groups of learners are engaged in online intercultural interaction and collaboration with partners from other cultural contexts or geographical locations as an integrated part of course work under the guidance of instructors (Jager, Nissen, Helm, Baroni & Rousset, 2019; O'Dowd, 2018; O'Dowd & Lewis, 2016). This study presents how a VE course was developed by engaging students in two EFL countries, Taiwan and Czech, via the pedagogical approach of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) to observe whether and how the nursing junior college students in Taiwan benefited from VE course in improving their communicative competence in English and integrating the key concepts of nursing EMPATHY in the English expressions. Forty-eight senior nurse students, who have had theoretical background in nursing practice, participated in the course. Consecutive oral and written learning activities lasting for 18 weeks were conducted, including (1) reading and role-playing regarding nursing workplace conversational text, (2) online platform-based oral self-monitoring exercises, (3) collaborative team-based script writing on nursing workplace conversation, (4) action drama contest on nursing workplace and with intercultural reviews, (5) group discussions via google meet on nursing workplace topics, and (6) face-to-face online live Q&A interaction with ELF partners. The course purpose is to bridge nursing-majored EFL learners to ESP in nursing profession. A qualitative content analysis of reported learning outcomes was conducted, based on the 48 learners' live conference interaction recording texts. Several key themes were identified via a post course questionnaire, which provides insight into the type of learning that VE course can contribute to ESP-for-Nursing classrooms. These included how virtual exchange contributed to forcing students to use linguistic strategy as a communicator in their ELF communication, and to conceptualize English as a tool for communication instead of as an abstract academic activity. Moreover, how the nurse students embedded two core elements: empathy and caring of nursing EMPATHY into the VE tasks is discussed.

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Developing Gender Awareness through Critical Literacy and Picture Book

In order to encourage more research on and practice of critical literacy in the EFL classroom, this paper explores a case study of critical literacy conducted at a university in Taiwan. Specifically, it focuses on one of three activities that took place during the 2018-2019 spring semester. The activity used two unconventional fairy tales taken from a comic book to help 34 freshmen create several classroom assignments and artifacts expressing alternative viewpoints. The current research combines two different frameworks, i.e., quantitative and qualitative approaches. Major data sources include (1) the researcher's journal entries, (2) classroom observations, (3) student assignments and artifacts, (4) students' reflection papers, (5) questionnaire responses, and (6) follow-up interviews. In conclusion, the present study indicates that most students had a positive attitude toward this personal, alternative, and meaningful activity. The activity encouraged students to bring their ideas about various female roles into the classroom, especially during discussions and in a writing assignment. This activity also suggests that unconventional female roles in picture books can be effective in promoting critical literacy. Students were offered a free space in which to learn how to re-examine female roles from a critical perspective. As critical theorists suggest, students should be engaged in critical education programs that encourage students to view texts from alternative viewpoints.

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Content and Genre Analysis in the Hospitality Industry in Taiwan: Exploring Intercultural Communication through Negative Hotel Reviews and Responses

In 2019, Taiwan saw an influx of over 7.5 million foreign visitors (MOCT, 2019). However, the Covid-19 pandemic significantly impacted the tourism sector due to international travel restrictions, leading to a global travel downturn from mid-March 2020 onwards (Abbas et al., 2021). Consequently, the number of foreign arrivals in Taiwan plummeted to 112,410 in 2021 (MOCT, 2021). This study delves into the issues surrounding online customer negative reviews (NRs) in the hotel industry, and the responses of hotel management teams to negative reviews (RNRs), with a focus on intercultural communication and genre analysis within the framework of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). An analysis is conducted on a corpus of Responses to Negative Reviews (RNRs) from top hotels in Taipei, posted on TripAdvisor, to meet the following research objectives: (1) to carry out a comprehensive content analysis of customer negative reviews, (2) to delineate the moves and steps within RNRs, and (3) to extract common expressions within each move and step. Hence, the goal of this study is to offer practical recommendations to both English language teaching and the tourism industry in Taiwan, with a view to enhancing intercultural communication between international tourists and Taiwan's hotel industry.

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"Such Wild and Orphan Things": Reading Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping against Absence of Mind

In the 2010 Absence of Mind, her Terry Lectures at Yale, Marilynne Robinson argues that Freudian psychoanalysis is decontextualized from history, culture, and nature. But her own 1980 novel Housekeeping militates for an understanding of psychoanalysis as not a simple cure for trauma, but a means to let traumatic loss open one up to the possibilities of the external environment. In this reading of the novel, protagonist Ruth learns to address her traumatic loss not as something to be resolved, nor as something to be coped with, but as something to be rejoiced in, for it opens her up to the possibility of transcending ordinary existence and comprehending the redemptive powers of memory. Through the act of narration, she transforms her trauma into a work of beauty, thus revealing the value even of events of the utmost sorrow and sublimating her existence into the realm of collective memory.

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The Roles of Teachers' Attitudes toward L2 Interaction and Communication Orientations in Teaching Intention and Behaviors

This study examines the roles of teachers' attitudes toward L2 interaction and their own communication orientations (i.e., L2 WTC, self-perceived communicative competence, and communication apprehension) in their teaching intention and behaviors. The study sample comprised 444 teachers of English teaching at high schools in northern Taiwan, and a questionnaire of six Likert-type scales was used for data collection. The results show that teachers' attitudes toward L2 classroom interaction and their L2 WTC are predictive of their instructional willingness and behaviors pertaining to integrating L2 interaction into their classroom instruction. Further, teachers' self-perceived communicative competence, L2 communication apprehension, and L2 WTC served as significant sources of teachers' attitudes toward L2 teacher-student interactions, whereas only L2 WTC was a predictive factor of teachers' attitudes toward student-student interactions in the classroom. The results have both pedagogical and research implications.