The quality of Taiwan’s higher education, especially English-language education, has been repeatedly criticized in recent years. How bad is the situation? Recent plans unveiled by Wowprime Group (王品集團) chairman Steve Day (戴勝益) to open its first restaurant outlet in the US are revealing. Day expressed concern that it would be difficult because fewer than 1 percent of his 16,000 employees can communicate in English. This is certainly a big challenge as the group strives to transform itself into an international corporation.
With over a dozen chains with some 400 outlets in Taiwan, China and Singapore, Wowprime is one of Taiwan’s largest restaurant chain operators. According to a 2012 survey released by the Educational Testing Service's (ETS) Taiwan office, 95.9 percent of Taiwan’s top 1,000 companies say that employees need to use English in their jobs, but only 2.4 percent of them are satisfied with the English communication skills of their employees. This gap suggests that there is something seriously wrong with our English-language education.
If we examine students' test scores, more than 12,000 senior high school students scored “zero” on the English composition component of the General Scholastic Ability Test (學測), which determines entrance to the nation’s universities.
Photo: Lin Hsiao-yun, Taipei Times
The English proficiency of university students is even worse. According to the ETS report on the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) between 2011 and 2013, the average scores for university students were 510, 504 and 501 points, respectively, which were much lower than the average scores of 572, 582 and 574 points for senior high school students. Taiwan’s TOEIC scores are falling behind many Asian countries, such as China, Malaysia, the Philippines and South Korea.
Why do Taiwan’s university graduates continue to have difficulty with English after learning it for at least 11 or 12 years at school? Because the English taught in universities isn’t practical and fails to prepare them to use it in the real world. The above TOEIC scores show that the English proficiency of most students peaks while they are preparing for the joint college entrance exam, and then declines during their university years because many universities merely require freshmen and sometimes sophomores to take English courses. No wonder their English is unsatisfactory when they enter the workplace. In other words, English-language education requires a drastic overhaul.
Firstly, class hours devoted to English-language education need to increase. Universities should provide English courses to not only freshmen but also sophomores, juniors and seniors. Instead of offering an average of two to three class hours per week, they should offer four to six class hours, and selective courses related specifically to students’ majors. Schools can encourage students to take language proficiency tests by providing certain incentives, and a graduation threshold of English proficiency may be helpful.
Photo: Hsieh Chia-chun, Taipei Times
Secondly, schools need to provide more practical English education. As many as 126 colleges and universities in Taiwan have English departments. But a survey released by the Global Education Association in Taiwan (GEAT) on Sept. 12 shows that eight English departments closed down or stopped recruitment over the past eight years due to rigid curricula and unpractical courses. Nine English departments have been transformed into tourism or some other departments to find a way out.
Even top universities are facing a crisis. For the prestigious Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Taiwan University, the number of applicants for its graduate school has decreased by half over the past three years, said Tseng Li-ling (曾麗玲), the department’s chair.
“This is shocking,” Tseng said.
This suggests that English departments that value literature are no longer attractive to the best and brightest students.
Tseng added that the graduate school plans to reduce the number of years it takes to graduate, and cut the number of pages for a master’s thesis from 80 to 60 to attract students. But if the department does not combine theory with practice and come up with more practical curricula, the number of students may drop further.
Chen Chao-ming (陳超明), GEAT’s CEO and a professor of English at Shih Chien University, also emphasized the importance of practicality at the forum.
“Taiwan’s English departments should redefine themselves and not be limited to cultivating English teachers, secretaries or writers,” Chen said.
He added that, apart from English, universities should provide useful “cross-disciplinary training,” and actively cooperate with industry so that students gain practical experience before entering the professional world and be able to compete on the global stage.
To achieve this, perhaps schools can adopt practical teaching methods such as ESP (English for special purposes), so as to improve students’ various English skills according to their specific needs. Otherwise, most students may be unable to speak English in the workplace after graduation, and the difficulty that Wowprime is experiencing may occur repeatedly in the future.
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