If you've ever been in an English classroom in Taiwan, you may find the following scene familiar. As you walk in, you find the desks lined up in columns facing the teacher, platform and blackboard.
The teacher is explaining lots of words, phrases, grammar and sentence structures by lecturing, while the students are busy filling their books or notebooks with many English and Chinese words.
The class looks awfully neat and disciplined, doesn't it? However, the teaching effectiveness is really questionable because it is not very student-centered and students depend on the teacher all the time, waiting for instructions such as repeating, reading aloud, translating sentences, answering perfunctory questions and so on.
If we agree that English is best learnt through communication and interaction, making students work together in pairs or groups is one of the best interpersonal approaches in the classroom. Group work usually means groups of six students or less, with the optimal number being three or four.
As mentioned above, many teachers lecture to teach English, making students feel that learning English is like learning math instead of a language for daily communication. In many cases, the teacher, not students, is the one doing most of the talking in the classroom.
From the perspective of learning theory, student learning retention (how much students remember after two weeks) is only about 5 percent when taught by lecturing. Only 5 percent! No wonder many teachers complain that they work so hard to teach every sentence in the texts but students still can't remember them.
The reason is simple: students don't initiate conversations or actively take part in learning; on the contrary, they are just passive learners, receiving knowledge by only listening to the teacher. It is likely that the low participation rate in the classroom accounts for the low learning retention.
Conversely, students' higher involvement in the English learning process yields higher retention of the material.
For example, research shows that students' retention rates are much higher when they work together, such as in group discussion (50 percent) and cooperative learning (75 percent), compared with traditional teaching methods like lecturing and reading. Thus, teachers should facilitate students' learning by getting them to work together, instead of mostly talking.
Most teachers (myself included) tend to talk too much in the classroom, without allowing enough time for students to respond to them or to initiate talking. However, if we as teachers realize that no matter how hard we try, the efficacy of lecturing is very limited, then we should make students work together in groups as much as possible.
Research has made the surprising finding that individual student practice time can increase five-fold over traditional methodology if even only half of the English class time is spent on group work. Therefore, the greatest advantage of group work is the amount of English output produced by each student. We all know that output is no less important than input since most of us learn how to speak English by actually speaking it. The more students use English in communication, the more they will acquire communicative competence.
In addition to less dependence on the teacher and more individual output, working together has many advantages. When working together, students can exchange their ideas and learn from each other.
The atmosphere of group discussion also makes them feel more secure and less anxious, and builds up their confidence and motivation in using English. Most importantly, they feel that they use English in a meaningful and authentic way, instead of learning English in a monotonous and decontextualized way. All of these can enhance students' English use via interaction and communication.
Note that English teachers cannot simply assign students a topic and then let them discuss it without any preparation. Getting students to work together is no less laborious (though much more effective) than the traditional method.
Teachers have to plan well for any interactive activities before getting started. Teachers need to give students explicit instructions and model the activities, teach them collaborative skills, and orchestrate and time the entire procedure.
While students are working together, teachers should walk around (instead of sitting at the front grading papers), listen in on as many groups as possible and take notes to give students feedback later.
Letting students work together not only helps English teachers better cope with larger classes but also effectively facilitates students' English learning through a communicative and fun way.
Kao Shih-fan is an assistant professor at Jinwen University of Science and Technology.
US President Donald Trump created some consternation in Taiwan last week when he told a news conference that a successful trade deal with China would help with “unification.” Although the People’s Republic of China has never ruled Taiwan, Trump’s language struck a raw nerve in Taiwan given his open siding with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression seeking to “reunify” Ukraine and Russia. On earlier occasions, Trump has criticized Taiwan for “stealing” the US’ chip industry and for relying too much on the US for defense, ominously presaging a weakening of US support for Taiwan. However, further examination of Trump’s remarks in
As strategic tensions escalate across the vast Indo-Pacific region, Taiwan has emerged as more than a potential flashpoint. It is the fulcrum upon which the credibility of the evolving American-led strategy of integrated deterrence now rests. How the US and regional powers like Japan respond to Taiwan’s defense, and how credible the deterrent against Chinese aggression proves to be, will profoundly shape the Indo-Pacific security architecture for years to come. A successful defense of Taiwan through strengthened deterrence in the Indo-Pacific would enhance the credibility of the US-led alliance system and underpin America’s global preeminence, while a failure of integrated deterrence would
It is being said every second day: The ongoing recall campaign in Taiwan — where citizens are trying to collect enough signatures to trigger re-elections for a number of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators — is orchestrated by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), or even President William Lai (賴清德) himself. The KMT makes the claim, and foreign media and analysts repeat it. However, they never show any proof — because there is not any. It is alarming how easily academics, journalists and experts toss around claims that amount to accusing a democratic government of conspiracy — without a shred of evidence. These
China on May 23, 1951, imposed the so-called “17-Point Agreement” to formally annex Tibet. In March, China in its 18th White Paper misleadingly said it laid “firm foundations for the region’s human rights cause.” The agreement is invalid in international law, because it was signed under threat. Ngapo Ngawang Jigme, head of the Tibetan delegation sent to China for peace negotiations, was not authorized to sign the agreement on behalf of the Tibetan government and the delegation was made to sign it under duress. After seven decades, Tibet remains intact and there is global outpouring of sympathy for Tibetans. This realization
RSS