Teach My Children English: Why Parents Want English Teaching for Their Children

This paper describes parents' reasons for sending their children to an English language course, their expectations from the English language instruction, and the disadvantages they perceive in getting their children to learn English at their early ages. A small-scale exploratory survey using questionnaires was conducted among 46 parents whose children learn English at a private course. The results indicate that the majority of the parents are generally aware of the practical values of providing English instruction for their children and hardly perceive any disadvantages in this early English learning. Also, they expect English instruction to enable their children to perform the four language skills, notably speaking. Implications for the young learners' first language as well as the teaching of young learners are then presented. These may offer teachers, parents, and other researchers some important points to consider

Instructional Aspects and Test Design for Measuring Teaching Ability in Content-based Instruction: a Case Study at Ma Chung University

Content-Based Instruction (CBI) is a fertile research area which calls for more intensive studies, especially in a country where English is a foreign language. Aiming at describing a typical profile of an initial stage of CBI in a private university, this paper reports a descriptive research that identifies instructional aspects of a CBI class, and sketches a preliminary specification of a test for measuring teaching ability in CBI. Qualitative data were collected through observation of the lecture sessions, open-ended questionnaires, and interviews with the students. A vocabulary profile analysis was also done to the lecture materials. The results were used as a basis for the test specification, which was later submitted to experts who judged the contents of the test. Important aspects that emerged from the data concerned linguistic performances, task, lecturer\u27s assistance, and learning obstacles. Accordingly, the test specification puts special emphases on delivery technique, amount of assistance, quality of tasks and rapport with the students