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The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of computer assisted pronunciation instruction in English pronunciation for students in vocational colleges and universities in Taiwan. The participants were fifty-one first-year undergraduate students from a technological university located in central Taiwan. The participants received an eight-week pronunciation instruction, in which the participants were presented model utterances and corresponding pitch contours of target sentences and then practiced pronunciation of target sentences with computer assisted pronunciation training software. Computerized speaking tests were conducted before, during, and after the training to measure the improvement of pronunciation quality, and a questionnaire was administered at the end of the instruction. The results of repeated measures analysis of variance on the scores of the tests indicate that the pronunciation quality of the participants was significantly improved. The results of this study provide empirical evidence in teaching pronunciation to vocational college students with computer technology.

This article investigates the effects of blogging as an approach to journal writing in the EFL writing classroom by means of a 16-week comparative experiment involving two groups of EFL college students. The experimental group (EG) was required to blog daily while the control group (CG) was asked to do so using traditional pen-and-paper methods. The writing performance and general attitudes to and perceptions of journal writing in both groups were evaluated through a writing test and a semi-structured survey. The research results show that blogging a journal helped the students to achieve a greater improvement in their writing than did the regular pen-and-paper treatment. Additionally, although both groups developed similar learning attitudes in general, the EG experienced significantly less anxiety in writing than did the CG. This suggests that the blogging approach is an effective approach for students in developing both writing skills and learning attitudes.

While borders traverse both land and sea, current research has mostly concentrated on issues concerning terrestrial borders. Simultaneously, a new body of scholarship has shown how the seemingly boundless oceans are in actuality subject to a variety of bordering forces. As such, we review current research on maritime borders in geography and other related disciplines in three categories: oceanic resource extraction and environmental conservation, volume geography and wet ontology, and concepts of ocean frontiers and voluminous states. Conclusively, we propose land-ocean inter-bordering, multiple materialities, and mobile state power as three future issues to respond to the rapid-changing maritime borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While most ethnic Chinese in northern Thailand are Thai citizens now, their everyday lives are a site where we can witness the political power entanglement of China, Taiwan and Thailand. With this in mind, this paper aims to look into the relationship between global China and overseas Chinese from the perspective of the ethnic Chinese in the northern borderlands of Thailand. The purpose is not just to disclose the multiplicity of global China in people's everyday lives, but also to complicate the picture of overseas Chinese as portrayed in top-down grand narratives about global China. I argue that the ongoing re-Sinicization in South-East Asia and the territorial geopolitics among China, Taiwan and Thailand have opened a conceptual space for the ethnic Chinese in northern Thailand to flexibly articulate themselves within the changing geopolitical economy. I use tea production and related Chinese-language education programmes, two separate but intertwined cases, to address these issues. By looking beyond the competition, conflict and dilemmas between China and Taiwan, I argue that Taiwan's previous engagement with agricultural transfer to Thailand and the rooting of pro-Taiwan identity and discourse in language education have paradoxically paved a way for China to stretch its influence into the everyday lives of the Chinese communities in the northern Thai borderlands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of offshore wind farms has been a way for the state to repackage national development projects using green energy discourses. In Taiwan, where the further development of nuclear power is suspended due to public antinuclear sentiment, offshore wind farms have been heavily promoted as a way of meeting electricity demand. The planned site for offshore wind farms, mainly the intertidal zone along the coast of Changhua County, overlaps with both oyster farms and the habitat of Taiwanese humpbacked dolphins, categorized as a critically endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. This has resulted in a clash between conserving the oyster farming landscape, protecting an endangered species, and developing green energy. Facing this dilemma, pro–wind farm discourses that highlight concerns about global climate change have gradually supplanted those stressing the welfare of oysters and dolphins, even though the latter have been used successfully as local icons by movements opposing previous development projects on the intertidal zone. This article reconsiders the politics of territorialization implied by the "green" label affixed to offshore wind farm projects and other forms of green energy in general. As such, the meaning of offshore wind farms, as a newly discovered energy resource, is intertwined with the changing meanings of both dolphins and oyster farms, as rival nonhuman objects of resource exploitation and natural conservation. The territorialization of such resources in the emerging discursive space of green energy has proceeded via relational placemaking with nonlinear connections among multiple human and nonhuman elements. Key Words: conservation, intertidal zone, landscape, renewable resources, resource frontier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Yuanshengtai, a term derived from Chinese idea of ecotourism to indicate the pristine condition of environment, has been connected to an imagined authentic indigenous culture in China. With the mark of Zhang Yimou—one of the most famous film director in China, the show Impression Lijiang has strived for exploiting the symbols and icons of ethnic minority culture in order to invent an imaginary space for tourists to experience a yuanshengtai borderland in southwest China. A UNESCO site, Lijiang is known for its geographic imagery of cultural and natural landscape and as the brightest prospect for expressing Chinese nationalism and cultivating modern Chinese tourists. As such, it has been gradually transformed into a stage for displaying and (dis)locating the spatial imagery of home for Chinese tourists in post-socialist China. This article illustrates how yuanshengtai performances are a cultural mechanism of the Chinese state to spark a yearning for home. We will proceed with a theoretical approach relating home and homemaking in China's cultural politics. After noting the research methods, we contextualize the development of yuanshengtai performances in Southwest China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay outlines the symbolic and material transformation of mountain agriculture in Taiwan by tracing the historical trajectories of temperate fruit production, and of apple growing in particular. Specifically, we look at the area of Lishan, a major production centre for apples and other temperate fruits in Taiwan's Central Mountain Range in order to explore the relationship between the mountain agriculture and the politics of territorialisation. Focusing on the post‐war era, we argue that the development of mountain agriculture in Taiwan, and upland fruit growing in particular, has operated as a 'more‐than‐human political technology'. The territory of Lishan is not just a passive geographical space, but engaged in a process of becoming, which re‐makes the mountain areas of Taiwan into 'apple zones' both spatially and socially. The spatial dimension centres on processes of political territorialisation, economic deterritorialisation and combined reterritorialisations whereby apple plantations have transformed the landscape from one focused on strategic politics to one embedded within development and market frameworks which entail their own particular forms of politics. The social dimensions are centred on the politics of forging connections among different elements circulating through the mountain areas of Taiwan, including apples, soldiers, transport infrastructures and agricultural policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the effects of blogging as an approach to journal writing in the EFL writing classroom by means of a 16-week comparative experiment involving two groups of EFL college students. The experimental group (EG) was required to blog daily while the control group (CG) was asked to do so using traditional pen-and-paper methods. The writing performance and general attitudes to and perceptions of journal writing in both groups were evaluated through a writing test and a semi-structured survey. The research results show that blogging a journal helped the students to achieve a greater improvement in their writing than did the regular pen-and-paper treatment. Additionally, although both groups developed similar learning attitudes in general, the EG experienced significantly less anxiety in writing than did the CG. This suggests that the blogging approach is an effective approach for students in developing both writing skills and learning attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]