Foreign language teaching in many Asian-Pacific countries in recent decades has shifted toward communicative-focused instruction. However, researchers have reported a gap between policy and practice. To incorporate teachers' voices in adopting the communicative approach in the curriculum, this study explores factors that promote or hinder EFL teachers' implementation of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) in Taiwanese college English classes. The findings indicated that the factors that impacted implementation of CLT related to teachers, students, the educational system, and suitability of CLT in the local context. Also, certain situational constraints were found to hinder the implementation of CTL. The article provides practical recommendations for teachers, educators, and policy makers to further improve teacher training, curriculum design, and situational constraints to ensure success in implementing the CLT approach.

Classrooms incorporating Cooperative Learning (CL) structures facilitate a supportive learning environment for English Language Learners (ELLs). Accurate pronunciation by ELLs is important for communication, and also benefits academic achievement. The known benefits of CL for ELLs make it a desirable learning environment to teach pronunciation skills. Thus, sufficient consideration must be given to its incorporation in curricula and delivery format. However, in implementing CL structuresin ELL classrooms, attention must be paid toincubation time for CL elements, social and cultural factors.This quasi-experiment, with a pre-post test two-treatment, formed by expanding across program designinvestigated the impact of a CL environment in the pronunciation skills of ELLs. Results showed that the difference between the improvement of the CL (experimental) group and the control group was not significant enough to claim that CL wasa major differential factor. Factors affecting the implementation of CL in ELL classroomsare discussed.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the performance metrics of a solar thermal power plant with dry cooling and further implement a method to increase the cycle efficiency, using passive cooling techniques within the dry cooling cycle. Current methods implementing dry cooled condensation use an air-cooled condenser for heat rejection. While this reduces the water consumption of the plant, it results in performance penalties in the overall plant between 5–10% [1]. Passive cooling methods can be used to alleviate the performance penalties. While passive cooling methods have been studied and used on a small scale, this model explores the possibilities of applying these methods to large-scale solar thermal power plants. Based on the model developed, it was found that underground-cooling techniques can improve the performance of the overall dry cooled solar thermal power plant by up to 3% at peak dry bulb temperatures. This study finds that there is a possibility to apply these passive cooling techniques on a large scale to yield positive results.

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