Taiwanese College Students’ Perceptions of Integrating Multimedia into ESP Courses

The purpose of this study was to investigate the learning difficulties and the preferred learning strategies among Taiwanese college students while they were taking English for Specific Purpose (ESP) courses. Two different ESP courses are examined: one of the courses is an undergraduate Marketing English course and the other is an undergraduate Hospitality English course, both in a college of liberal arts and social science in the national university in Taiwan. The instructor in the ESP courses adopted the multimedia—integrated instruction. The multimedia—integrated instruction not only provided authentic materials for learners in the target ESP, but also offered students real situational settings and useful activities that based on individual need. The result of the study indicated that students’ self-learning effectiveness in both performance and linguistic skills were significantly improved. In addition, they reported satisfaction with the multimedia-integrated instruction. Thus, the multimedia—integrated instruction increase learners’ motivation and also offer a solution to learners’ problems in the development of ESP courses

The Impact of Multimedia Materials Teaching on EFL Elementary School Learners

Nowadays, it is hard for EFL students to learn a foreign language well because of the learning environment and limited teaching materials. Therefore, if we are willing to create a successful foreign language learning classroom, the use of multimedia will be very important. Besides, learning with multimedia has become the latest tendency among the education field. For instance, many researches and professionals all approve that various materials of multimedia learning can make the learning more productive, impressive, abundant, and memorable. In this research, multimedia materials were constructed by video clips. Furthermore, after adopting multimedia materials, some findings showed that multimedia-material teaching can strongly increase the vocabulary acquisition in a short period of time. In addition, students can learn not only by spelling and images, but also by vivid of video clips presentation and sounds to make connections to their daily life. Furthermore, through the interect program, their learning motivation is higher than the traditional teaching styles. Students get more positive learning attitude and their self-efficacy all been improved. Therefore, multimedia-material teaching can make learners learning more productive, abundant and efficient; therefore, using multimedia-material teaching will be one of the important teaching materials that can be applied in the classroom

Constructing space-filling curves of compact connected manifolds

AbstractLet M be a compact connected (topological) manifold of finite- or infinite-dimension n. Let 0 ⩽ r ⩽ 1 be arbitrary but fixed. We construct in this paper a space-filling curve f from [0,1] onto M, under which M is the image of a compact set A of Hausdorff dimension r. Moreover, the restriction of f to A is one-to-one over the image of a dense subset provided that 0 ⩽ r ⩽ log|2n/log(2n + 2). The proof is based on the special case where M is the Hilbert cube [0,1]ω

Effects of English Teaching with Interactive Whiteboards in the Elementary English Classrooms

The purpose of the study was to probe the effectiveness of English language teaching through Interactive Whiteboards (IWBs). Three specific factors were probed: (a) the results from immediate test and retention test; (b) students’ perceptions related to the utilization of IWBs; (c) the advantages and disadvantages of the technology-supported instruction. Forty-three students from Grade 3 students in Sahes Elementary School in Taiwan were engaged in either technology-supported group or none technology-supported group. The results revealed that the experimental group through technology-supported instruction significantly outperformed the control group on students’ immediate test and retention test. Moreover, students’ perceptions related to the IWBs indicated that most of them enjoying learning English in the technology-supported classrooms. Finally, the results also showed the advantages and disadvantages through the IWBs instructions. The study revealed that teaching through technology was an effective way to help students in English learning

Effect of the presence of virus-like particles on bacterial growth in sunlit xurface and dark deep ocean environments in the southern East China Sea

© The Author(s), 2021. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Tsai, A.-Y., Lin, Y.-T., & Gong, G.-C. Effect of the presence of virus-like particles on bacterial growth in sunlit xurface and dark deep ocean environments in the southern East China Sea. Water, 13(20), (2021): 2934, https://doi.org/10.3390/w13202934.Virus-like particles (VLPs) are thought to increase the dissolved organic carbon by releasing the contents of the host cell, which, in turn, can affect bacterial growth in natural aquatic environments. Yet, experimental tests have shown that the effect of VLPs on the bacterial growth rate at different depths has seldom been studied. Bacteria–VLP interaction and the effect of VLPs on bacterial growth rate in the sunlit surface (3 m) and dark, deep ocean (130 m) environments were first explored at a test site in the southern East China Sea of the northwest Pacific. Our experimental results indicated that bacterial and virus-like particle (VLP) abundance decreased with depth from 0.8 ± 0.3 × 105 cells mL−1 and 1.8 ± 0.4 × 106 VLPs mL−1 at 3 m to 0.4 ± 0.1 × 105 cells mL−1 and 1.4 ± 0.3 × 106 VLPs mL−1 at 130 m. We found that the abundance of VLPs to Bacteria Ratio (VBR) in the dark deep ocean (VBR = 35.0 ± 5.6) was higher than in the sunlit surface environment (VBR = 22.5 ± 2.1). The most interesting finding is that in the dark, deep ocean region the bacterial growth rate in the presence of VLPs was higher (0.05 h−1) than that in virus-diluted treatments (0.01 h−1). However, there was no significant difference in the bacterial growth rates between the treatments in the sunlit surface ocean region. Deep-sea ecosystems are dark and extreme environments that lack primary photosynthetic production, and our estimates imply that the contribution of recycled carbon by viral lysis is highly significant for bacterial growth in the dark, deep ocean environment. Further work for more study sites is needed to identify the relationship of VLPs and their hosts to enable us to understand the role of VLPs at different depths in the East China Sea.The research was supported by RFBR projects 18-44-920026, and the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, grant number NSC 109-2611-M-019-013 and NSC 110-2611-M-019-005