Yesterday I had my last class in the most difficult job I've had in my teaching career to date, which was 12 hours a week of conversational English instruction in a technical college. My concluding impression is that the Taiwanese educational system is basically shit. It is not providing sufficient social or communication skills to Taiwanese youth to adequately prepare them to compete in the modern, international workplace. Why is it that after 12 years or more of studying English, students cannot answer questions such as 'how old are you?'; questions that they were in fact able to answer when they were in kindergarten and early elementary school? It's because they have wasted their six years of junior high and high school education memorizing alphabetical lists of vocabulary for tests, vocabulary which was way beyond their conversational abilities and that they will most likely never be able to use in real life situations.
Many of my students seemed to have basically given up on the language. Attendance hovered at 50% by the end of the semester, and of those who did attend class, up to half of them slept through it or looked at their smartphones the whole time. Others misbehaved like as if they were 12 years old. Some students even filed complaints to a local teacher that I was making them speak in class (in a CONVERSATIONAL class!) When I tried to conduct some simple conversational activities, ones that formed the bulk of my lessons when I taught young adults in another country, the students were confused as to why I was making them ask each other questions, and when it was their turn, they would just speak in Chinese to their neighbor and were too scared to even look at me, let alone reply to me, even if I asked them to just answer the question in Chinese. If I asked students what they did that weekend, they would all just copy their classmate's answers, most of which were "I stay at home," "play computer games," or "I sleep". And of course, SOME students were great, I will truly miss them, and I know that they are the ones who will travel and succeed in their lives. It seems that some students are actually able to survive the crushing weight of 12 years of having creativity, ideas, and individual thinking stifled, and all free time consumed by homework and cram school classes that often serve no purpose other than filling time and making money; but for them to do so takes true perseverance, or rich parents that can afford to put them in decent schools right from the start or send them abroad to study.
I'm sorry Taiwan, but language is a SPOKEN phenomenon. Having a university-level reading ability will not get you very far in the real world if you can't say a word. The TOEIC exam, Taiwan's standard English proficiency exam for adults, is composed of 200 multiple choice questions, with no oral component. I know, because I write them. Some of the customers that my company sells the exams to asked that I take the test myself, which I did recently, to prove that my English ability is adequate. Never mind that I am a native speaker or have a published book. The mentality here is that linguistic ability, or knowledge in general can be reduced to multiple choice questions or memorization needs to die. In this country, all the emphasis is put on tests, the results of which get students into the right schools, which in turn gets them into the right jobs (in Taiwan). But if ACTUALLY learning English ever becomes a priority here, or training youth in skills that will be required abroad or for socializing with people face to face instead of by staring at an smartphone screen, then the whole system needs to be revamped. Please share your comments or thoughts.
La fuente proviene del siguiente link de facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nickkembel/posts/10151289442068839
