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.
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