Having read commentary over the past several weeks concerning Taiwanese students and their English proficiency ratings, I find myself compelled to write from the perspective of a trained, experience and licensed educator teaching in Taiwan.
To begin with, there is some validity to Cartridge's assertion that, "students need to be immersed in English language and culture to learn it effectively."
Congratulations Cartridge, you just reflected something that any imbecile with half a brain cell functioning in their frontal lobes could have told you about language acquisition.
For anecdotal and entertaining evidence of the obvious truth to Cartridge's elementary deduction, compare the Chinese acquisition of a native English speaking resident of a small Taiwanese community on the east coast, where the pool of English-speaking ex-pats is relatively small, to that of expats in Taipei and Hsinchu, where the pool of native English-speaking expats is significantly larger.
This elementary and mundane rhetoric, however, does not address the embarrassing reality revealed by Chan Sheng-en (
Namely, that Taiwan does not merely trail behind its more developed neighbors such as Japan and Hong Kong in English proficiency, but also far less developed countries that, by all measurable rights, have no business beating Taiwan at anything and yet, surprisingly enough, do.
This begs the obvious question: why?
There are admittedly complex reasons guiding and governing language acquisition.
A language learner whose native tongue is tonal and non-phonetic will of course have a more difficult time acquiring a phonetic language than a person who is transitioning from one phonetic system to another (such as a Korean who learns English), or whose language is based on the same alphabet and is merely transitioning from one usage of the alphabet to another (such as a Spanish speaker learning English or French).
But again, the sheer volume of tonal, character-based language learners in other countries who learn English at a far more rapid and efficient pace than Taiwanese students should, if nothing else, cause eminently more embarrassment and loss of face than it currently does.
I believe my experience explains why Taiwanese students are inherently doomed to failure -- at least in English acquisition, if not in a more broad and sweeping sense.
As a trained and licensed educator with more than 60 graduate level credit hours or training and full-time teaching under my belt, why would I want to stay in a system and a society whose government either cannot, or will not, do something as basic as enforce contracts?
The answer is I don't want to, and I will not.
At the end of my current contract in Taiwan, I will leave, and I will not return. I will take less money in a less developed country in Asia, or simply return to the US to teach, rather than waste another minute in a country whose very behavior and outlook on life and business explain in simplest terms why the rest of the world doesn't take Taiwan seriously.
Why should they take Taiwan seriously? It neither deserves to be taken seriously nor should it be taken seriously, and I for one will not take this country seriously. In the simplest English expression I know: Good luck to you. You're going to need it.
Scott Austin
Rural Taiwan
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