O n f e r e n c e

Methodology
Thirty Taiwanese EFL fourth graders from two intact classes of a suburban school were 
recruited to verify the effectiveness of using the ABRA website. One class (N = 13) was 
randomly assigned to the teacher-directed web-based instruction group, whereas the 
other group (N = 17) was assigned to the student-controlled web-based instruction 
group. Twelve participants (six from each class) with low, intermediate and high 
proficiency level were selected to be interviewed. Besides, to avoid extremely high or low 
scores, the proficiency level of the interviewed subjects ranged from low to high, with 2 
of high proficiency level, 2 of intermediate level and 2 of low level. The proficiency of the 
participants was verified by the pretest. 

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-100- 
2014 CALL Conference 
LINGUAPOLIS
www.antwerpcall.be 
The participants were given 10 multiple choice questions of decoding achievement test as 
the pretest and the posttest to measure their decoding performance. The pretest/posttest 
was divided into two parts, i.e., auditory blending test (5 items) and auditory segmenting 
test (5 items). The pretest/posttest was also used to verify the homogeneity between the 
two groups of participants. 
Referencing Liu, Liu, and Hwang (2011), a 30-item 4-point Likert scale questionnaire 
with a high reliability coefficient of .891 for the teacher-directed web-based instruction 
group and .931 for the student-controlled web-based instruction group was developed as 
the second instrument. It included 4 major parts: web usability (items 1 to 8), learning 
materials (items 9 to 16), functionality (items 17 to 23), and feedback to the web-based 
instruction (items 24 to 30). 
To further examine the participants’ in
-depth response, the 
third instrument was the interviews for the two groups in which six students were chosen 
from each group respectively with high, intermediate and low English proficiency. All 
interviews were recorded individually, and were then transcribed.
This preliminary study took two class periods (one class period = 30 minutes). In the first 
class period, the participants in the two groups took about 10 minutes to complete the 
pretest, and then the teacher conducted the teaching experiment for 20 minutes. Before 
the experiment, the teacher divided 4 to 5 students into one small group. For the 
teacher-directed web-based instruction group, the students sat on their seats and raised 
their hands to answer the questions according to the blending and segmenting learning 
activities in the 
ABRA
website, whereas for the student-controlled web-based instruction 
group, the students came to the stage and used the SMART board to answer the 
questions. In the second class period, the participants took around 10 minutes to 
complete the posttest. Then all participants took 10 minutes to respond to the 
questionnaire depending on their own thoughts and feelings about the website. In the 
last 10 minutes, 12 participants from the two groups were asked to receive a one-on-one 
interview.