Background

With the development of World Wide Web, more and more people are participating

in learning activities on the Internet. When a number of people with a common

learning goal form a group, it is called a learning community. Online learning

communities are gradually altering traditional learning styles because of the

pervasiveness of the Internet. Members of these communities come from various

places, and have different educational backgrounds and different proficiency levels.

They interact for mutual learning of a common subject, such as a second language. In

general, online learning community provides a main subject to learn for high school

students. Take high school students in Taiwan as an example, English learning is one

of a main subject that government pays full attention to.

English has become an important tool of international communication in the era of

globalization and more frequent international exchanges among businesses as well as

education. As a non-English speaking country, it is important for Taiwan, which has

made English as a foreign language, to improve the English proficiency in order to

connect with the world stage. In 1998, the Panel of Grade 1-9 curriculum in Taiwan’s

Ministry of Education made English a learning subject for primary schools, taking

down the age of learning English in the compulsory education from junior high school

to primary school. In recent years, the government has been aware of the

incompetence of Taiwanese students’ in TOEFL scores when comparing with peers

from Singapore, Hong Kong and China; therefore, the Taiwan’s Ministry of Education

started promoting and encouraging all students to take the GEPT (General English

Proficiency Test) since 1999. The focus of the test is to provide a reliable and fair

examination for each level of English proficiency. Thus, English learning is not only

the personal demand, but also a global trend when heading towards the new century.

Rovai (2002) observed that, in an online learning community, all members expect

that their learning needs will be satisfied by pursuing a common learning goal. It

could be said that the members develop a common “collective consciousness”,

because they build relationships with one another and their instructors via the user

interface. The diverse interactive media play a support role in learning. Therefore, it is

necessary to consider the needs of learners and the characteristics of each online

learning community when designing online learning courses (Dede, 1996).

There are a lot of English online learning communities that provide rich materials

and contents, so that users could utilize the specialties such as the convenience of the

Internet and personalized learning. This is different from traditional way of learning

English in the classroom. The environment of online learning community has

gradually been formed as more and more people join the website and learn to each

other. Members of the community could share and exchange their experiences during

the process of learning through an interactive way. In the context of traditional

classroom learning, teachers who determine the curriculum guide the course through

face-to-face learning. Students absorb the course content from the teachers in the class

and interact with peers or instructors through discussions. In general, the teacher plays

an authoritative role. It is difficult for us to know whether students are active or

passive participants. They may need to complete the work or task assigned by the

teacher and get credits after passing the exam. However, we do not know whether

such a learning method is suitable for everyone. Undoubtedly, the traditional

classroom learning model is still the norm, despite the restrictions on time, space, and

class sizes.

To advocate excellent English books and to enhance English comprehension for

high school students, IWiLL, an English online learning community, has been

regularly holding annual English Reading Challenge contest since 2000. Averagely,

there are thousands of students who are also IWiLL online members signing up for

this contest. However, how are these online members going to be influenced in their

future language learning by participating in such a contest? What are their

participative motivations? All of these are intriguing issues for researchers.

The current trend in education is to apply technology in the learning process. As

more teachers adopt information technology to assist instruction, more researchers

will investigate the issue of technology-integrated education. Davis (1986), who

proposed the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), suggested that the ease of use

and usefulness of a technology affect users' intention to use it. Therefore, we can

predict users’ willingness to accept technology based on their perception by using

TAM model. In this study, we build an Intelligent Web-based Interactive Language

Learning (IWiLL) community as an online English learning platform for high school

students throughout Taiwan. Members of this community can share their learning

experiences and discuss course contents with each other. Specifically, we use the

TAM model as our framework, and seek other factors that may affect Intention to Use

an Online Learning Community to construct our model. We also discuss the casual

relationships between the identified factors and explain the real-world phenomena.