| dc.description.abstract | In recent years, higher education appraisal in Taiwan has focused on the outcome-based teaching and assessments approaches. The construction of the curriculum mapping and core competencies in universities across Taiwan emphasizes the students’ acquisition of abilities and skills. However, studies regarding to how teachers conduct outcome-oriented teaching are still lacking. This study explores how a teacher of a Freshman Chinese course focused on the three core competencies and implemented teaching strategies in order to clearly delineate the teacher’s assets and the difficulties during the teaching process. The subjects of study include one college teacher and 23 students. The analysis of the teacher’s reflection of the students’ learning results through triangulation, In addition to interview the teacher, the researchers also entered the classroom to observe the teaching and learning of the class for one year, as well as collected the students’ work in order to triangulate the results from multiple sources.
The results show that the teacher not only emphasized on cultivating students’ critical thinking skills, but more importantly, he strongly believed that students should begin by knowing themselves before expanding their scope to the people and the world around them, which was why the teacher used autobiographies to encourage his students to cultivate a positive attitude toward expressing their feelings and learned how to deal with obstacles. In addition, the teacher conducted several group discussions during the class. He encouraged students to analyze what these writers were thinking and acting while they encountered major difficulties. However, the teacher encountered some obstacles during class discussions. With in-depth analysis, the study found the reasons of the difficulties were due to two reasons: the students’ lack of background information of the discussion theme, and lack of motivation for further exploration. During the interviews with the students, the students said that they felt that the teacher seemed to have standard answers to the questions he probed, and therefore these students were worried that they could not come up with the ‘correct’ answers as the teacher expected. Finally, the implications are provided for college teachers and universities regarding to the design of instructional and teaching strategies to enhance the quality of Freshmen Chinese courses.
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