Communicative task modeling and its practice on academic English learning in a web-based environment

A web-based course for scholarly communicative language competence development via a distance tutoring system is presented. Particular focus is given to the description of the representation and organization of communicative tasks representing the subject matter knowledge in terms of communicative-goal, input for achieving this goal and activity derived from this input. Moreover, the link relations among the three knowledge structures are represented as the curriculum knowledge describing the goal structure of each lesson, the different perspectives to organize the lesson and the order in which lesson elements should be presented. Furthermore, an education-oriented communication mechanism is developed to introduce an adaptable web-course with focus on communication and communication control. Finally, an experiment is conducted to examine the effectiveness of the knowledge transfer and knowledge related communications between a web-course and the student-users.