Abstract

Taiwan’s higher technological and vocational education reforms were initiated in 1996. The reforms intended to convert all traditional junior colleges into institutes of technology or universities of technology. The purpose of this study was to understand English instructors’ perceptions of students’ self-awareness of learning after the higher education reforms. A self-administered questionnaire was utilized for this study by using a quantitative paradigm. A total of 750 English instructors were included in the sample for this study. The total number of returned questionnaires was 497 copies out of the 750 sent, resulting in a 66% return rate. This study found no important or consistent predictability of students’ self-awareness of learning when using instructors’ age, years of teaching experience in higher education, gender, college affiliation, educational background and academic rank. While there existed a strong level of negative perception among the decisive respondents, that level of support (or lack of positive perception) was not predictable based upon a multitude of predictive factors. It was notable that student self-awareness of learning received extremely negative responses from all respondents. Thus, students’ self-awareness of learning should be a major concern and there must be an integration of programs designed for improving the students’ learning motivation toward self-awareness. In addition, the Ministry of Education should provide and increase financial support and a further training for the students necessary to improve the employment capability.