陳玟君 Wen-Chun Chen
Volume 12 Number 1 (2021/06/01) ; p65 – 88
DOI: 10.6706/TIESPJ.202106_12(1).0004
Abstract
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, because of its exclusion from the World Health Organization, Taiwan has been relying on international media to voice itself and partake in the global battle against the fast-spreading disease. Under this premise, this study demonstrates an innovative instructional design for the course titled News English for International Literacy, with the goal to elevate students’ motivation and competence to read-watch English news. A learning-centered approach was adopted to replace conventional ESP language-centered model: identifying the starting and endpoints of students’ learning journey and the route in between. Accordingly, this action research featured needs assessment, team-teaching with field experts, and two-stage role-play. The course timeline synchronized with the development of pandemic; the training prepared students to interact with multimodal journalistic sources to understand ever-changing global development. Twenty-six college-level participants from four different majors joined the study in the southern Taiwan. The data collection instruments included entry and exit surveys, pre-posttests, focus group interviews, and role-play footages. The results showed that students’ frequency of international news reading-viewing increased drastically, while their sense of difficulty dropped significantly. In addition, their international news sources widely diversified. The progresses between the parallel assessments on news knowledge and comprehension and international literacy also indicated significant differences. Students expressed positively about the step-wise instruction, especially the inclusion of field experts, and the contextualized meaning-making in the role-play.