GUIDELINES
Current high school curriculum guidelines require schools to reserve four sessions — approximately 200 minutes — per week for English classes, but they do not necessarily have to provide English writing classes.
Even if schools would like to offer English writing lessons, school authorities could only do so after the schools' English teaching staff win over teachers of other subjects in a vote for teaching hours at the beginning of every semester.
“If we fail to obtain any [elective] teaching hours at the vote, we can't schedule any [writing] classes that semester,” a high school English teacher surnamed Hsieh (謝) said in Taichung.
Despite the lack of official writing classes, the curriculum guidelines still set goals for high school students' English writing proficiency.
The guidelines state that high school graduates should be able to “correctly distinguish a capital letter from a small letter and use punctuation marks.”
Graduates should have the ability to “correctly merge and paraphrase sentences” and make correct sentences by using appropriate phrases or sentence patterns.
Students should be able to write a smooth and clear paragraph by the time they finish high school, the guidelines say.
But the harsh reality is that with only four English sessions per week, teachers may not have enough time to teach students how to write properly.
“I distribute work sheets to freshmen and mention some writing concepts when teaching the materials readings in the textbook. That's all I can do,” Hsieh said.
Gary Chi (紀昇助), an English teacher at Taipei's Huajiang Senior High School, said he could only assign students weekly translation practice.
“I've found that it would be too much to ask them to write a passage before they could construct a grammatical sentence. And really, they can't write grammatical sentences,” Chi said.
Chi said he tried to introduce basic writing concepts to his students, but “writing is almost as difficult as calculus” to the students.
Chi said although he wanted to spend extra time helping students polish their writing, he was exhausted after spending every week grading the compositions of his 88 students.
Doing so also seriously put him behind his regular teaching schedule, Chi said, acknowledging the difficulty for teachers to help individual student with their writing in a large class.
DOWNSIZE
“What we are doing now is wrong. Classes should be downsized to 15 students, starting from primary school,” he said.
Chen also emphasized the importance of teachers changing their methodology from explaining grammar to allowing students to actually use language.
“We will never make it if we still teach the English language as an academic subject,” he said.
Tseng said learning how to write in English should begin in junior high school with sentence-making and gradually evolve to writing in paragraphs in senior high school.
Another problem at the policy level, he said, was that the Ministry of Education should stop measuring every student's writing proficiency with the curriculum guidelines.
“This is like measuring the ability of students with different levels of proficiency using the same criterion. This is impractical,” he said. “Everyone has a different problem. There should be an approach catering to everyone's needs.”
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