The junior high school Basic Competency Test (BCT) percentile ranks have been announced and for the English section the distribution of results continues a double-peak pattern.
Yet many students and teachers said that the English section of this year's test was easier than ever and that it only measured whether examinees were careful when answering the questions.
Exam monitors also observed that some students started to guess about answers as soon as they got the exam form, and when they were done they just went to sleep at their desks. Such behavior is really unbelievable.
Can this behavior really be explained away by saying it's just a double-peak phenomenon?
I took a careful look at this year's BCT English exam. The content was indeed completely based in everyday life. This is in line with the purpose of the BCT.
For students who aim for high marks by studying outside class and getting familiar with the test's pitfalls, traps and tricks, this is like a cold bath. Such an exam gives them no scope to use their abilities. The most important factor that determines if a student does well is not their abilities or how hard they studied, but how carefully they take the exam.
Because the English section of the BCT only has multiple choice questions and doesn't test writing skills, many junior high students have serious problems with core language skills like spelling or forming sentences. This causes despair among senior high school teachers, because even if they spend a lot of extra time on teaching these skills, it is still very hard to close the curriculum gap.
This year, an essay composition was added to the Chinese section of the exam. Most examinees will make an extra effort to strengthen their Chinese writing skills in order to pass the exam. I think the English section should set a skills threshold. The exam should contain some simple writing, such as Chinese-to-English translation.
For a number of years now, I have been an examiner for the English writing section of university entrance examinations and I have seen some of the problems that senior high school students experience when learning English. But the causes of the appalling exam results lie in junior high school or even earlier.
According to government plans, 12-year public education will be made compulsory in two years. When that time comes, poorer students will have to continue studying English longer. And if they have already given up on English before they graduate from junior high school, how are they to endure another three years in senior high school? How are the teachers supposed to teach them?
This is something that Ministry of Education officials, academics and teachers who are now working on the English curriculum for the 2009 academic year should give some serious thought to.
Hugo Tseng is an associate professor of English at Soochow University, and secretary-general of the Taiwanese Association for Translating and Interpreting.
Translated by Anna Stiggelbout
Wherever one looks, the United States is ceding ground to China. From foreign aid to foreign trade, and from reorganizations to organizational guidance, the Trump administration has embarked on a stunning effort to hobble itself in grappling with what his own secretary of state calls “the most potent and dangerous near-peer adversary this nation has ever confronted.” The problems start at the Department of State. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has asserted that “it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power” and that the world has returned to multipolarity, with “multi-great powers in different parts of the
President William Lai (賴清德) recently attended an event in Taipei marking the end of World War II in Europe, emphasizing in his speech: “Using force to invade another country is an unjust act and will ultimately fail.” In just a few words, he captured the core values of the postwar international order and reminded us again: History is not just for reflection, but serves as a warning for the present. From a broad historical perspective, his statement carries weight. For centuries, international relations operated under the law of the jungle — where the strong dominated and the weak were constrained. That
The Executive Yuan recently revised a page of its Web site on ethnic groups in Taiwan, replacing the term “Han” (漢族) with “the rest of the population.” The page, which was updated on March 24, describes the composition of Taiwan’s registered households as indigenous (2.5 percent), foreign origin (1.2 percent) and the rest of the population (96.2 percent). The change was picked up by a social media user and amplified by local media, sparking heated discussion over the weekend. The pan-blue and pro-China camp called it a politically motivated desinicization attempt to obscure the Han Chinese ethnicity of most Taiwanese.
The Legislative Yuan passed an amendment on Friday last week to add four national holidays and make Workers’ Day a national holiday for all sectors — a move referred to as “four plus one.” The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), who used their combined legislative majority to push the bill through its third reading, claim the holidays were chosen based on their inherent significance and social relevance. However, in passing the amendment, they have stuck to the traditional mindset of taking a holiday just for the sake of it, failing to make good use of
RSS