Critical thinking about crosscultural differences between Chinese and Americans in English education in Taiwan

This project is designed to teach crosscultural differences in English education in Taiwan employing a strategy-based curriculum. By comparing crosscultural differences between Taiwan and American cultures, students will have a strong desire to learn English in order to know more about American culture

Chinese sports policy and globalisation: the case of the Olympic movement, elite football and elite basketball

This thesis seeks to analyse to what extent, in what ways and with what success does the Chinese government seek to manage its interaction with sport globalisation in Olympic Movement, football and basketball? Held et al's (1999) conceptualisation of globalisation provides the major theoretical framework for the analysis. In order to analyse the behaviour of the Chinese state we adopt Houlihan's (1994) concepts of 'reach' and 'response' which focus attention on global actors and pressures external to the country and state (reach) and the capacity of states to determine their response. A set of quantitative and qualitative indicators of globalisation have been identified. Data were collected from a number of sources including official government documents, news media, and a series of 32 interviews with Chinese officials. The analysis reveals that the Chinese government has demonstrated a desire and a capacity to manage the impact of the Olympic Movement, global football and basketball on domestic sport practices; and second, the Chinese government has attempted, with reasonable success, to manage the impact of commercial interests on Chinese domestic football, basketball and other Olympic sports practices, elite athletes and professional clubs. However, a number of tensions exist: first, between the priorities of commercial clubs and national teams' development; and second, between the highly paid and internationally mobile 'star players' and the centrally controlled elite development system

The development of basketball in Taiwan: from the perspectives of theories of governance and strategic relations

This thesis has sought to investigate the nature of the governance system relating to basketball in Taiwanese society with emphasis on the development of basketball against the backdrop of societal development in Taiwan and in the broader political-cultural environment. Two complementary theoretical approaches are adopted in this study: those of governance theory at the meso level of analysis; and a strategic-relational approach at the macro level to explain the ways in which governance decisions are taken in strategically selective contexts which facilitate and constrain certain actions and thus outcomes. The empirical analysis draws on a qualitative case-study approach, which was based on documentary materials and semi-structured interviews. Three major cases, namely, the collapse of the Chinese Basketball Alliance, the emergence of the Super Basketball League and the sporting links with China, were selected on the basis of their significance in the operational governance of basketball. The first is a specific event, the second focuses on a particular process, and the third on the impact of context. The perceptions of the stakeholders in the specific groups were reviewed in order to compose insights into their account of the principal interests and forces in the governance system. Interview transcripts and government reports were subject to coding employing Nvivo 9 qualitative data analysis software, and coding and analysis were undertaken employing an ethnographic content analysis approach. While governance theory provides an explanatory framework at the meso-level of analysis, the thesis argues for embedding this within a wider strategic relational meta-theoretical account. This emphasises the dialectic relationship between strategic, reflexive actors and the strategic selectivity of the context of decision-making which privileges certain strategies and tactics, and explains the structural coherence (and/or patterns of incoherence) which have emerged in the evolving nature of the governance of basketball in Taiwan. By focusing on these three inter-related studies, we provided linked spatio-temporal forms of explanation of how the collapse of the CBA provided the strategic context and strategic resources for the emergence of the SBL and the Sina Basketball Club s migration to China. Subsequently the case of the SBL and Sina provided the strategic context and strategic resources for Taiwanese players migration to China as individual sportsmen. The thesis has thus produced explanations of how the outcomes of one case provide the strategically inscribed selectivity of the next which with recursively selected strategies and tactics on the part of stakeholders produces the structured coherence/pattern (and / or incoherence) of the Taiwanese (male) prospective-professional basketball system

Passage to Rights: Rethinking Indigenous People’s Drinking Practices in Taiwan

This thesis aims to explicate the meaning of indigenous people’s drinking practices and their relation to indigenous people’s contemporary living situations in settler-colonial Taiwan. ‘Problematic’ alcohol use has been co-opted into the diagnostic categories of mental disorders; meanwhile, the perception that indigenous people have a high prevalence of drinking nowadays means that government agencies continue to make efforts to reduce such ‘problems’. Indigenous people in Taiwan still face continuous marginalisation and systemic discrimination which render drinking a prominent issue. However, interventions based on public health narratives lack efficacy due to discordant understandings of illness, moral experience and perceptions of culture. Based on 12 months of multi-sited research in Taiwan, my study finds indigenous drinking cultures have been both generated and reshaped by their life situations, both historically and contemporarily. Drinking practices today reveal suffering under structural violence but also show resistance emerging from social change. Drinking is also practised at the interstices of contested values that make health narratives invalid. An ever-reproducing drinking culture shows a gesture of self-fashioning under multiple sufferings, as well as strategies to restore livelihoods. In the time to pursue transitional justice, indigenous people’s symbolic sobriety unfolds through resistance against current governmentality over drinking in one sense, but fighting for autonomy in another. Therefore, drinking can be understood as a ‘passage to rites/rights’ that represents the struggle of indigenous people in search of traditional values and future respect

Redrawing Taiwanese spatial identities after martial law: text, space and hybridity in the post-colonial condition

Colonial powers exert dominance over their subject countries in multiple registers, for example, education and spatial constructions, which foster the colonised other‘s identification with the colonial power centre. Racial and local cultures of subject nations are thus systematically distorted and the transmission of memory through material culture is obscured. Focusing on contemporary Taiwan, this research examines how architectural and ideological strategies were employed by the dominant authorities to consolidate the power centre and explores possible means for shaping Taiwanese spatial subjectivity in the historical aftermath of such situations. The research examines the Formosans‘ ambiguous identification with local cultures and marginal spatial propositions, as well as discussing the inculcation of the 'great Chinese ideology‘ by analysing the teaching materials used in modern Taiwanese primary education. Reviewing aspects of contemporary post-colonial theory, the research explores the spatial implications of Taiwanese post-colonial textual narratives and argues for them as a potential source for the construction of contemporary spatial conditions, as these novels are shaped by an awareness of the importance of local cultures and the voices of marginalised people. The thesis thus suggests that a re-thinking of Taiwan‘s public spaces can be stimulated by spatial metaphors in textual narratives that associate peoples‘ memories of political and local events with spatial images that were previously suppressed. To explore the potential for the generation of space through reference to literary works, this research studies the ‗narrative architecture‘ experiments of the 1970s and 80s and goes on to propose a series of representational media for the construction of spatial narrations in Taiwan. Multiple spatial propositions concerning the island‘s post-colonial condition can be suggested by the visualisation of spatial metaphors that are embedded in Taiwanese textual narratives. At the end of the thesis, two proposals for post-colonial spatial narration are put forward, which transform the spatial propositions latent in the devices developed through a new juxtaposition with existing urban contexts. The intention of the research is to indicate a new urban spatial strategy for Taiwan, one that can allow its people to grasp the multiple layers of their conflicted spatial history while at the same time responding to the ongoing spatial confrontation between the power centre and the voices in the margins

Narrative motion on the two-dimensional plane: the “video-ization” of photography and characterization of reality

"Art is not truth. Art is a lie that enables us to recognize truth" Pablo Picasso Time, as known to many, is an indispensable component of photography. Period(s) included in “single” photographs are usually and naturally much shorter than periods documented in video works. Yet, when it comes to combining photos taken at different times on one photographical surface, it becomes possible to see remnants of longer periods of time. Whatever method you use, the many traces left by different moments, lead to the positive notion of timelessness (lack of time dependence) due to the plural presences of time at once. This concept of timelessness sometimes carries the content of the photo to anonymity, the substance becomes multi-layered and hierarchy disappears. This paper focuses on creating photographical narratives within the two-dimensional world. The possibility of working in layers with transparency within the computer environment enables us to overlay succession of moments seized from time on top of each other, in order to create a storyline spread in time that is otherwise not possible to express in a single photograph, unless properly staged. Truth with the capital T is not taken as the departure point in this article; on the contrary, personal delineations of temporary yet experienced smaller realities is suggested

Developing an intercultural English curriculum of university level in Taiwan

The rationale of this thesis stems from the argument that intercultural skills and knowledge are indispensable to the process of internationalizing Higher Education in Taiwan, which is a primary goal set by the Taiwanese government. This thesis seeks to investigate how the integration of cultural studies with English as a Foreign Language syllabus can provide Taiwanese university students with opportunities to enter an ‘inter’ space where they cross linguistic and cultural boundaries, and where they are able to engage in cross cultural dialogue. It presents both theoretical and practical components of a potential culturally based university English course. The theoretical concept of the “third space”, as described by Bhabha and Kramsch and others, is a crucial dimension in the intercultural classroom in which students can reinterpret Otherness and their own culture. This thesis also explores how a cultural syllabus that includes essential elements of cultural studies and that utilizes generally available materials and topics, with appropriate instructional approaches, can be interwoven into the English language classroom and provide students with opportunities to critically voice their own opinions. Data were collected during a five-month study among first year university students in a medical university in Taiwan. Quantitative and qualitative data together provide evidence to determine a necessity for intercultural competence in the language classroom, and possible ways it can be developed or enhanced. The evidence indicates that given appropriate opportunities, students are willing to deepen their sociocultural knowledge of Self and Other and at the same time improve their language skills. This thesis offers a perspective that differs from the traditional four skills English education that presently dominates education in Taiwan. It concludes by recommending including an intercultural syllabus in EFL classrooms at the tertiary level and with implications for university and national educational policies and practices, and includes recommendations for future research

Annual Report Of Research and Creative Productions, January to December, 2007

2007 Annual Report of Research and Creative Productions, Morehead State University, Division of Academic Affairs, Research and Creative Productions Committee