A Taipei City Councilor yesterday condemned Taipei Municipal Shipai Junior High School for using material from English-learning magazines on tests, suggesting that the school had collaborated with publishers to force students to purchase the publications.
Taipei City Councilor Wang Chih-ping (汪志冰), who accompanied a student’s mother yesterday at a press conference, accused the school of using content from magazines such as Let’s Talk in English and Studio Classroom on mid-term and final exams in English.
The school did not teach the texts in class, forcing the students to purchase the magazines to prepare for their exams, Wang said.
PHOTO: CHIEN JUNG-FONG, TAIPEI TIMES
“These English-learning magazines should be independent study materials. But the school used the exams to scare the students so they would have no choice but to buy the magazines,” Wang told reporters at Taipei City Council.
The mother, who wore a mask to avoid revealing her identity, said her child’s English teacher had inserted purchase slips for the magazines into the books that children take home each day for parents to sign off on their homework, and that almost all the parents had bought the magazines because they were worried their children would not pass the exams without them.
Wang said she suspected that the school and the publishers had collaborated to sell the magazines.
In response, school head Huang Sheng-hsian (黃勝賢) said the magazines were teaching aides for the “International Prospects” course for seventh graders and that teachers regularly played the accompanying CDs for students to practice listening skills.
Questions from the magazines only made up 10 percent of the English exams, he said.
Wang said that 27 of 69 municipal junior high schools encouraged students to purchase a variety of English-learning magazines as supplementary learning materials starting in the seventh grade, but that it was unclear how many of these schools used texts from the extra materials on tests.
Wang said Taipei Municipal Junior High School regulations stated that teachers may not copy test questions from magazines.
Shih Po-hui (施博惠), a division chief of the Taipei City Department of Education, said the department respected the right of schools to choose supplementary materials, but that it would require that schools not copy content from such materials for exams.
Starlux Airlines, Taiwan’s newest international carrier, has announced it would apply to join the Oneworld global airline alliance before the end of next year. In an investor conference on Monday, Starlux Airlines chief executive officer Glenn Chai (翟健華) said joining the alliance would help it access Taiwan. Chai said that if accepted, Starlux would work with other airlines in the alliance on flight schedules, passenger transits and frequent flyer programs. The Oneworld alliance has 13 members, including American Airlines, British Airways, Cathay Pacific and Qantas, and serves more than 900 destinations in 170 territories. Joining Oneworld would also help boost
A new tropical storm formed late yesterday near Guam and is to approach closest to Taiwan on Thursday, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. Tropical Storm Pulasan became the 14th named storm of the year at 9:25pm yesterday, the agency said. As of 8am today, it was near Guam traveling northwest at 21kph, it said. The storm’s structure is relatively loose and conditions for strengthening are limited, WeatherRisk analyst Wu Sheng-yu (吳聖宇) said on Facebook. Its path is likely to be similar to Typhoon Bebinca, which passed north of Taiwan over Japan’s Ryukyu Islands and made landfall in Shanghai this morning, he said. However, it
Taiwan's Gold Apollo Co (金阿波羅通信) said today that the pagers used in detonations in Lebanon the day before were not made by it, but by a company called BAC which has a license to use its brand. At least nine people were killed and nearly 3,000 wounded when pagers used by Hezbollah members detonated simultaneously across Lebanon yesterday. Images of destroyed pagers analyzed by Reuters showed a format and stickers on the back that were consistent with pagers made by Gold Apollo. A senior Lebanese security source told Reuters that Hezbollah had ordered 5,000 pagers from Taiwan-based Gold Apollo. "The product was not
COLD FACTS: ‘Snow skin’ mooncakes, made with a glutinous rice skin and kept at a low temperature, have relatively few calories compared with other mooncakes Traditional mooncakes are a typical treat for many Taiwanese in the lead-up to the Mid-Autumn Festival, but a Taipei-based dietitian has urged people not to eat more than one per day and not to have them every day due to their high fat and calorie content. As mooncakes contain a lot of oil and sugar, they can have negative health effects on older people and those with diabetes, said Lai Yu-han (賴俞含), a dietitian at Taipei Hospital of the Ministry of Health and Welfare. “The maximum you can have is one mooncake a day, and do not eat them every day,” Lai
RSS