Instructional approaches used for teaching English reading to technological and vocational college students in Taiwan

The purpose of the study was to investigate current instructional approaches used for teaching English reading to technological and vocational college students in their freshman year in Taiwan. With the focus on the five essential components of reading instruction identified by the National Reading Panel, including phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension, this study examined how frequently the instructional approaches to the five essential components identified in research literature were used for teaching English reading at the college level in Taiwan.;A researcher-developed questionnaire collected data from 122 instructors at five technological and vocational colleges in a rural area of central Taiwan. Five-point Liked scales established means and standard deviations for the extent to which the instructors of Freshman English Reading used instructional approaches to teach the five essential components. Inferential analyses including t tests and one-way ANOVAs were used to examine if there were significant differences in the extent of providing instruction in the five essential components between instructors who received advanced training in Taiwan and outside of Taiwan, and among instructors at five college groups, respectively. A total of 101 (82.8%) valid questionnaires were returned with usable data for statistical analysis.;Descriptive and inferential analyses showed that approaches to vocabulary instruction were used most frequently, whereas approaches to phonemic awareness instruction were used least frequently. Instructors who received advanced training outside of Taiwan gave significantly higher ratings in the frequency of use of instructional approaches to phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, and vocabulary than instructors who received advanced training in Taiwan, but were not significantly different in the frequency of use of instructional approaches to text comprehension. Instructors from five technological and vocational colleges did not differ from each other significantly in the frequency of use of instructional approaches to fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension, but significantly differed in the frequency of use of instructional approaches to phonemic awareness and phonics.;Prior to this study, little was known pertaining to the current practices of teaching English reading at the college level in Taiwan. This study successfully establishes baseline research regarding the extent of the instructional approaches to the five essential components used in Freshman English Reading in Taiwan.