Using CALL technology to motivate low-achieving vocational high schoolEnglish classes

• Main Authors: Su-jung Chen, 陳素蓉
• Other Authors: Shian-jung Chen
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/89400233162187468643

碩士 === 國立臺灣科技大學 === 應用外語系 === 102 === The present study aims to explore the effects of using CALL technology to motivate low-achieving vocational high school English classes. Most of vocational high school students feel bored in English class and frustrated about learning English and some of them have entirely given up learning English. The participants of the study were 94 first year of vocational high students from two classes in a vocation high school in Taipei area. Students of the experimental group were majored in Information and Technology and control group were majored in Food and Beverage Management. A nine-week CALL Technology instruction was given to all the participants in the experiment group. Hyperlinking annotated materials were used to conduct all the study. The reading comprehension test of GEPT elementary level and school midterm were used as the pretest and final exam of school’s academic performances was used as the posttest. After using a CALL system to help with students’ learning, a questionnaire about using CALL Technology was conducted to explore the effect of the use of CALL Technology. And five participants were randomly selected to have interview with the researcher to elicit more information and details about their response and feedback from using CALL Technology. The collected data were analyzed by SPSS Independent Sample t-test and Paired Sample t-test and Microsoft Excel 2007. The major findings of the study are summarized as follows: (1) Use of the digital learning system by the experiment group had a positive effect on low-achieving vocational high school students’ school academic performances. This shows that the participants in the experiment group make some progress after receiving CALL Technology. CALL Technology is really beneficial to bettering English learning. (2) Most subjects participating in this study had a positive response toward CALL Technology. The findings imply that vocational high school students need a new way to arouse their motivation and help them not to give up learning English. Through the language exposure, it creates an environment for students to understand English better. (3)Through using CALL Technology, students could decide what part they were going to learn. Their attitude of learning changed from passive role to active learning. Results indicate that CALL Technology can facilitate their understanding of English text and arouse their motivation as well. Based on the findings of this study, some implications were provided and several suggestions for future studies were offered at the end of this thesis.