Abstract
As globalization and rapid development of science and technology has brought huge impact on today’s world, it is important for non-English speaking countries such as Taiwan, Republic of China, to actively participate in the international community through communication in the international language, English. In higher education, dissemination of research achievements through publication of international journals has been a common degree requirement, the practice in public researchoriented universities being the noticeable example. However, graduate students who have such needs are often unprepared to demonstrate acceptable academic writing abilities in English. To facilitate effective access to research information and to promote national academic excellence through international publications, it is essential to promote writing instruction of English for Academic Purposes (EAP). Meanwhile, Web-based environments provide a viable choice of delivery of EAP courses and the computer-mediated communication tools help formation of the student body as virtual organizations as they learn with one another.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Corpus: A collection of natural occurring language text, chosen to characterize the state or variety of a language.
Collocation: The natural co-occurrence of a string of words whose meaning is inferable from literal concepts
Natural Language Processing: To use various computing technologies to process natural languages used by human beings (as opposed to machine or artificial languages) in order to understand or produce the languages. For instance, parsing as a typical type of processing is to analyze an English sentence in order to group words into subject (the doer of an action) and verb phrase (the action).
Moodle: A free course management system with open source, which stands for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environments.
Move: According to Santos (1996), a “move” is a communicative unit that serves the major communicative purpose of the genre.
Concordancer: A text manipulation tool originally used by lexicographers but nowadays popularly promoted among foreign language teachers and learners. Such a program displays character strings before and after a key word or phrase based on the computer text corpus the program is fed in.
Genre: A genre comprises a class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes. These purposes are recognized by the expert members of the parent discourse community and thereby constitute the rationale for the genre. This rationale shapes the schematic structure of the discourse and influences and constrains choice of content and style (Swales, 1990).