National Taiwan University

This course teaches effective communication skills in science and engineering fields, such as effective reports and summaries, how to communicate with employers, and how to write academically as well as in the workplace. The course covers how to write a CV, including things to highlight and things to avoid; writing a statement of purpose; and interviewing. Students undertake their own research topics and write a scientific publication, prepare a scientific poster, and present their findings to the class.

This Chinese language course is for students who have taken General Chinese Language Course - Beginning Chinese I or those who have taken Chinese for at least 100 hours. The course improves effective communication skills in daily life activities; teaches appropriate Chinese to make arrangements with friends, order food at restaurants, etc. Students practice reading, writing, listening, and speaking ability. Students also further their understanding of Taiwanese culture and language. This course uses the textbook "Practical Audio-Visual Chinese I" (Chapter 7 - Chapter 12). 

This course examines poetry and literature from the Tang dynasty to Song dynasty in classical Chinese. Students analyze line by line of the poetry written by famous Chinese scholars. These literati express their feelings, emotions, attachment, relationship with the garden they own in these poetry. The poetries are specifically on garden poetry---which is poetry written about gardens and the emotion of literati. The course is taught all in Chinese with readings in classical Chinese.

This class is mainly taught in Chinese and is for students who have mastered more than 450 Chinese words or have more than 320 hours of Chinese language instruction. The course includes Taiwanese pronunciation (initials, finals, intonation, transposition, soft tone, legato); spelling of Roman characters and review of commonly used Chinese characters in Taiwanese; sentence building exercises; question answering and dialogue exercises for advanced sentence patterns; Taiwanese songs; Taiwanese tongue twisters, popular proverbs, jokes, essays, and stories; and Taiwanese culture.

The course presents geographic information systems (GIS)-related technologies and applications. The course introduces the theory and application of the geographic information system as well as provides practice using the software. Topics: GIS profile; GIS applications; GIS data formats and integrated systems; spatial data capture and integration; database management concepts; and spatial data analysis. The course includes a term project using GIS to investigate a topic of choice. Assessment: homework (60%), term project write up (30%), and term project presentation (10%).

Economic development affects the living standards and options of people. The question of why some countries grow much faster than others is perhaps the central question in the study of development. This course approaches this question by reviewing and explaining the logic behind the most important arguments that have been advanced to account for differences across countries in rates and levels of economic development. The emphasis is on the studies of growth (both theoretical models and empirical work), population structure, inequality, poverty, fiscal policies, financial development and trade.

This course takes discourses on popular culture as its point of departure to discuss the cultural meaning and reverberation of popular culture today. As a dominant cultural phenomenon and force, popular culture has infiltrated into our everyday life and helped shape our identity and worldview. Within the critical tradition on popular culture, there has been a heated debate with regard to the pros and cons of popular culture in terms of cultural politics: to what extent is popular culture reinforcing the dominant stereotypes of gender, sexuality, race, and class? And to what extent can popular culture subvert or even intervene dominant cultural hegemony? This course provides an opportunity to look into how popular culture is constructed and appropriated in tandem with its potential to disrupt practices of dominant cultural hegemony. Key texts on popular culture are read closely, and students will be encouraged to investigate practices of contemporary popular culture that are of interest to them. To make students familiar with key concepts of popular culture and cultivate the ability to analyze forms of contemporary popular culture with a critical perspective.

This course explores the topic of music and culture in Baroque Italy. The topic of this course thus offers extremely fertile material for the exploration of rich networks of cultural, aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual experiences in early modern Europe. Lecture topics include Florence and the birth of Opera; Madrigal, Early Baroque opera, Peri and Monteverdi; Venice and the rise of public musical institutions; Italian sacred music of the mid-17th century, Monteverdi and Carissimi; Rome and the Catholic Counter-Reformation; academy, opera houses, conservatories, and Ospedali; early Baroque Milan and urban identity; Naples and the development of Opera Seria and Opera Buffa; and Italian sacred music of the Late Baroque era. Assessment: listening quizzes, discussion session preparation.

This course is designed to provide students with an introductory understanding of Anglo-American law. It starts with a detailed discussion of the establishment of modern judicial review and the workings of the United States Supreme Court. Next, general features in common law development and procedures are taught. The third part of this course is devoted to an understanding of how judicial power exercised in common law jurisdictions (particularly in the American federal legal system). Last, the course discusses some of the important developments in Anglo-American legal culture and education. 

This course provides basic skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing in Thai, to survive in daily life or while travelling. It covers Thai culture and develops a better understanding of Thai conventional manners, as well as acknowledge contraindications in various occasions. The course introduces fundamental grammar and Thai phonetics. It presents the 44 consonants, 32 vowels, five tones in this language.