In May, Premier Yu Shyi-kun officially introduced the Cabinet's Challenge 2008: The Six-Year National Development Plan (
In response to the plan, Caves Books, PhonePass and Studio Classroom conducted a joint opinion poll about English learning between June and July. Only about 10 percent of the 1,072 respondents to the poll -- people between the ages of 20 and 45 -- said they were confident enough to use English. Almost half said they were particularly weak at listening to and speaking English. The poll results pose a serious challenge to the Cabinet's ambitious plan.
The poll also showed that people below the age of 30 are generally more confident about speaking English than those in their thirties and older. Those in the greater Taipei area are also more confident about speaking English than those in other areas.
That younger people are more confident about using English is, I believe, a positive result of the education reform over the past few years, as the core of our English-language education has gradually shifted from grammar rules and sentence structures to oral proficiency and communicative competence.
Under the government's plan, "Taiwan should designate Eng-lish a quasi-official language and expand the use of English as a part of daily life." To enable us to accomplish this, I would encourage English teachers to constantly employ communicative teaching approaches to serve the need of students to communicate better with others.
Teachers must always be prepared to revise their teaching methods and more functional curricula are needed to prepare students to face the real world outside the classroom. To this end, practical training for language teachers is crucial. A survey of Taipei's high school English-language teachers shows that nearly half of them have never attended any Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) workshops and do not know how to adopt this popular teaching approach. The government must quickly improve the training of English teachers.
The English language proficiency gap between urban and rural areas is a result of the uneven distribution of resources and teachers' obsessions with their students' academic performance. Schools in big cities are capable of providing more Eng-lish instruction than those in rural areas and of hiring qualified, native-speaker teachers. Educational authorities must pay special attention to the rural areas to remedy this problem. Students must be also taught according to their specific levels, and traditional written tests should no longer be the sole criteria for evaluation.
It's interesting to note that the poll results also indicate that although adults in general prefer to learn English by reading books, newspapers and magazines, or watching English TV and movies, those in the greater Taipei area have a much higher tendency to learn English by making foreign friends and going to study or travel abroad.
An English-speaking environment appears conducive to the boosting of their motivation and the reduction of their anxiety about speaking English, making them feel more comfortable in using the target language. How to create a stimulating English-speaking environment through various learning activities should be a matter for consideration by our language teachers.
It's time for us to reform our English-language learning methods in order to meet the need to learn English to communicate, not to pass tests.
Chang Sheng-en is a lecturer of English at National Taipei College of Business.
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