I am not an ESL teacher but I think the main problem is exposure. No matter how much they learn at school, the moment they finish the class they stop using or hearing English until the next class. I don’t know how to fix it either, except a slow but concerted effort of increased immigration and more classes in English.
I can understand your frustration.
I also have to watch out for my career.
I am also “persona non grata” in some districts now, despite the workshops I’ve offered.
More details maybe best conveyed via DM.
This is why English as an official second language is such a farce. Consider the last time you have left your home and conducted any kind of business, buying or anything, involved using English only. English as an “official second language” is a dream only dreamt by idiots with political ideations!
It’s misguided, certainly. Taiwan looked at Singapore and said “we can do that!” It somehow didn’t occur to them that Singapore already had a pretty sizable English population, due to 200 or more years of British rule.
Taiwan really could transform itself in to a bilingual (Mand-Eng) country if it put a bit of work into it. The problem is they would need to hire native English speakers to do things currently reserved for Taiwanese nationals only. Even the MRT announcements are slightly awkward, though “great for Asia”. Hiring English speakers to work at everyday places (7-11, breakfast stands, etc.) and record announcements in natural-sounding English (voice actors don’t get a say when they’re asked to record Chinglish) would make a world of difference, but who wants to work for NT130/ hr? Also, that sounds like the most antinational thing they could do.
The government would also need to regulate English cram schools so they’re not existing with the sole purpose of making a profit (not all are, but so many are). My students are excellent at putting together grammatically correct nonsense sentences using SAT level vocab. Good thing they don’t even know what they mean! That needs to end in favor of getting people to understand that language is a tool for communication. This doesn’t sit well with anyone in power.
English textbooks should be something published by a UK or US publisher, cuz the MOE has some messed up ideas about what is “necessary” to be proficient in English, and their revised versions don’t do anyone any favors.
The GEPT only encourages more moronic English, so that needs to be done away with.
Otherwise, I guess they could send in a team of people to spellcheck every street sign, menu, map, etc in the country. Blanket legislation that everyone MUST provide English translations of everything? Once that’s all good, you’ve done little, because English literacy here doesn’t exist due to the manner in which phonics is [not even sort of] introduced.
Force people to speak English or face corporal punishment the way the Japanese forced people to speak Japanese. That’ll learn ‘em!
This is exhausting.
I think that a lot of young people are already bilingual. I notice people in 7-11 using English when I check out. Taiwan is on a course for large scale bilingualism because language schools have become de rigueur in the last 30 years.
The public schools are a big can of worms. I worked in a wonderland program where we spent one day teaching kids about airplanes, hotels, cooking, etc. Completely useless! It did have the effect of bringing a licensed teacher from America into Taiwan, where I have been teaching for the last 5 years. That said, no self respecting foreign English teacher can stomach working in the public schools for more than a year or 2.
It will take a lot of work to make public schools bilingual because there are kids in every class that don’t have private lessons. How can you teach subjects in English when little Johnny doesn’t know the first thing? This problem will always exist in my mind.
Language schools exist, yes, but do people learn anything in them? Sure, some do. Most don’t. The high school kids I know who really can speak English are either the children of wealthy parents (not too wealthy, just very much of means) with lots of opportunities to travel abroad, and Christians who have some sort of English bible study or other opportunity to speak English in a “real world” / “relevant to life” context. I’ve worked at public schools here for the past five years, and most of my students at top cram schools do well on their tests and the GEPT…and can’t carry on a conversation that goes beyond “how are you? Did you eat breakfast? What did you eat?” And, if I’m lucky they can answer “what did you do last night?”. That’s junior and senior high kids, where their textbook expects way more from them. A select few play computer games and watch English TV enough that they can have long conversations with me, but those students often fail their standardized English tests, so they fall in to the “bad at English” category. Even in Taipei I had students with massive vocabularies and no context with which to use them.
Those English wonderland/ English village programs are worthless. I was forced to work at one one day a week for a year and I could not believe the willingness of the local education bureau to believe that the kids were learning anything. Total waste of resources, no accountability. Very taxing on the sanity of every foreign teacher there, none of whom were certified teachers (in my case). Nothing can be learned in 1-2 days in that context.
Annoyingly, the Concordia language camps in MN have pretty successful immersion weekends. My sister went to the German one for a weekend after maybe a year of middle school level German and she felt like she learned a lot. Her German wouldn’t have been anything close to what a Taiwanese student’s English should be at in Grade 6, yet she came back talking at me in German for a good week or two. As I don’t speak German, I can’t speak for the accuracy of what she was saying, but she was motivated to try and that’s kind of the point of immersion. I feel like this is just another one of those things that the TW government saw as successful under different circumstances and failed epically to recreate.
Public schools are failures in the English language teaching because they fail to use any teaching method that is proven to work. If you meet anyone under the age of 50 in western Europe, they all speak English better than even some of the best (Taiwanese) English speakers in Taiwan. Virtually none of them have private tutoring or attend language schools. But most can carry on conversations in English using complex language, cultural references, idioms, etc without a problem. It has everything to do with how it’s taught, not how many hours.
I’m so tired of people in Taiwan making excuses about access to English classes outside of day school. I taught Chinese in the US to G7-12 students who never heard a sound of Chinese before entering my classroom and never went home and studied. We had a total of 3 hours of Chinese per week. By the end of the first year (40 weeks), students were able to converse intelligently in Chinese about where they were from, who was in their family, ages, careers, days and dates, school subjects, hobbies, things they liked, what they did on the weekends, food, weather, and clothing.
That’s a good chunk of Taiwan’s G7-8 English textbooks, which is mostly reviewing what was taught in G3-6. My students were not a bunch of “highly motivated” kids with tons going for them and all in honors classes. They learned quickly and they learned well in the classroom because I had a phenomenal team of world language teachers to surround me and help me learn the most effective ways to teach language. We collaborated weekly and built a fantastic curriculum across the world language department that churned out students who, on average, intermediate-high on the ACTFL OPI after five years. Meanwhile, my neighbors at the time were taking Chinese at a different school…and after three years didn’t know what “你的中文名字是什麼?” meant.
So very very much about language teaching comes down to effectivness of the teacher. In Taiwan, teachers are unwilling to change. Blaming it in little Johnny because his parents won’t or can’t pay for cram school is a heck of a lot less work than rethinking an entire curriculum and teaching style. But it also gets this country nowhere. I tried so hard to implement what I learned teaching in the US, but I’ve been met with nothing but resistance, most often being told “our students aren’t at that level” and, somehow “that’s too easy for them” (when it’s clearly not). So I get to doze off watching my coteachers do a grammar review for 15 minutes of my classes. I can’t imagine being a student and trying to learn anything from that. The point of language is communication, yet zero communication practice takes place in Taiwan’s English classrooms.
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I think to ask Taiwanese teachers to change or adapt is a losing proposition. I do have faith in the newer teachers that are graduating and entering the public schools. I know of one personally and she is quite well educated in language acquisition. If she will be given an opportunity to succeed remains to be seen.
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I’m surprised about all the pessimistic comments. I really think that 2030 is a strong possibility. Two places to start are 1) pay public school teachers more and have them offer more subjects
2) tighten the regulations on these fake international schools. They offer more money and many of their teachers aren’t qualifed.
The government just needs to offer services in English and Chinese to start.
It’ll take some work, but I hope more people have faith.
Canada is bilingual but most can’t speak both languages. They’re both offered in school and in government services
I am from Canada myself, and I can tell you that just because Canada has two official languages, and just because the Canadian prime minister is bilingual, it does not mean that Canada is entirely bilingual. In Canada we have our shortcomings as a result of the social political and linguistic divisions that has existed in Canada since day one. The vast majority of English speaking Canadians (the majority of the country overall) does not know how to speak French, and the majority of people in Quebec who are French speaking do not know how to speak English. Canadians who a bilingual with English and French are a very small percentage in our country. Most of whom live in Eastern Ontario, New Brunswick, the Montreal area, Western Quebec, and along the US border in Quebec.
When it comes to bilingualism, yes it is good. However reading from the comments here, I think most of the netizens here do have a point. The way the bilingual education is being implemented here in Taiwan is not effective at all. Generally I would not compare the Canadian situation with Taiwan because the way things are done here is different than in Canada. There are hundreds of words here on this thread that explains why the bilingual education here in Taiwan is not working. It’s not a matter of being pessimistic, its a matter of being realistic. If there is going to be a bilingual program here in Taiwan, it has to be implemented in the right way.
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It doesn’t need to be but it’s the most practical.
IMHO they need to teach Math and Science in English, completely.
I agree with you.
I think the aim of Taiwan is to be something like candian bilingualism. Not everyone can speak both languages but all government services are offered in both and schools offer schooling in both.
My point was that it can be done this way. Tsai won reelection and bilingual 2030 was part of her platform. I’m assuming that means more money.
Let’s see. I’m optimistic about it and I hope the schools can change
Agreed. Let’s hope for the best
I don’t see a big advantage to teaching core classes in English or even having bilingual public schools. If the parents want English instruction they can go to a private school. If they can’t afford a private school they can go to an English buxiban and if they can’t afford that they can have the grandma teach them.
I believe English is the language of the future and everyone should learn it. That said, I don’t think everyone needs to be Shakespeare.
I think you are on to something here. As someone who went to a bilingual school with only the government required classes taught in Spanish (more than 65% of my classes were in English). The fact that one of my parents spoke English and the other one decided to learn English at that time really helped. We watched everything in English without subtitles, our Computers were all in English etc. Even though all my classmates speak English now, you can clearly see who was exposed to English outside the classroom.
Add history and Geography too!
So basically you are saying that it’s best for Taiwan’s public school to stick with EFL right?
The thing is not all students will be bilingual with English and Mandarin, but if they are going to learn English in the public schools, the students have to be on a level playing field. When I was in Taiwan 10 years ago I taught only EFL. It was mainly conversational English and basic phonetic awareness. I did not expect all of my students at that time to be bilingual. The main goal was for them to learn basic conversational English phrases (just like how they do it in the Korean public school system). There are students who will be ahead in their basic English levels, and students who will not be so advanced. All their backgrounds in learning English are different. That is why I said that they need an EFL program that will put them on a level playing field with one single objective.
Also consider the fact that here in Taiwan, there are Indigenous students who are struggling with the learning of English. I had Indigenous students who did not perform so well in English, but you cannot generalize them on that because I know Indigenous people here in Taiwan who are very good at communicating in English. But part of the reason why several Indigenous youth are struggling with English is because they are under a lot of stress to learn to know their Indigenous languages along with speaking Mandarin as Taiwan’s official language. (There are other root causes to this as well which we can leave for another topic).
So yes, I would agree that it is best for Taiwan to stick with EFL if the implementation of the bilingual education program is proving to be unsuccessful.
Personally I still don’t understand why the goal is bilingualism. (okay, I guess I understand why the government has that goal, but I disagree with it.) You’re not going to change the lingua franca in Taiwan, it’s still going to be Mandarin (with some pockets of Hokkien and less so Hakka). I think a push for more + better English is good, and will help Taiwanese businesses and overall international presence, but I really think saying ‘bilingual 2030’ is a dumb way to go about it.
On the other hand, Taiwan already has Taiwanese Hokkien, Hakka, and indigenous languages as official languages. The cynic (realist?) in me says that this whole English thing won’t actually change anything day-to-day and it will just be added to the list of ‘official’ languages in Taiwan despite virtually no one speaking it.
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[quote=“eCanada, post:31, topic:188316”] I
think the aim of Taiwan is to be something like candian bilingualism. Not everyone can speak both languages but all government services are offered in both and schools offer schooling in both.
[/quote]
I love the idea of being “Canadian bilingual” in Taiwan, as it gives a level of choice. I think it could work if there is always someone available on every staff who speaks at least one of the languages with native proficiency.
What I would like to point out is that Canada is bilingual in French and English because those were the two main groups that took over that part of North America. Taiwan is starting from scratch/ colonizing itself with a foreign language. In the US, we don’t have any official language, but English is, obviously, used most widely. In many big chain stores, signage will be in English and Spanish. If there’s a big Spanish speaking population, someone on staff (often) speaks Spanish. But in Louisiana you’ll have French Creole; in MN and central Wisconsin there’s Hmong. Much of the population only realizes there’s a community that speaks that language when they come across bilingual announcements or stare at the signs in the ER, but the language is available and accessible to the people who speak it.
It could work, but I think it should be optional.
Can you imagine trying to get people over the age of 60 in any Western country to be bilingual in Chinese by 2030? That’s the level of leap Taiwan is asking certainly for the older generation to just be able to speak English with virtually no background.
It has to start with basic conversations. The government also says they just want basic conversion skills. The problem is, even now the textbooks don’t teach basic conversations. They teach isolated grammar and vocabulary words that can’t be used in the grammar patterns provided, making for impossible conversation practice. Most teachers I know here genuinely believe that introducing grammar and vocabulary in isolation will provide the students with the foundation they need for “when the day comes that they need to use it.” The day is yesterday. This goes for the public schools, (lots of private schools) and cram schools. At the same time, the government wants bilingual classrooms. If a student doesn’t know how to think about the meaning of “Is he sad?” when the teacher is pointing to a poster that says “he = 他“ and the picture on the power point shows a sad boy, there is no way that same student will be able to think about the meaning behind any academic English.
Between regular school and cram school, the opportunity to have true conversion practice here is very limited, but that should be the sole focus until students have an ability to “communicate on a wide range of topics that happen in the past, present, and future”. When students reach that benchmark, it’s time to go back and learn why verbs change or the difference between “there is”, “there are” and “they are”. Or not. If they get enough input they don’t really need much explicit instruction…
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I’m not sure I see the difference between EFL and ESL. It’s not my belief that the government needs to mandate fluency in all students. In my experience, the kids that start speaking English early and continue speaking it in buxiban have a great grasp of the language. We don’t necessarily need the public schools to step in right now.
Down the road I do wonder how the public schools will deal with a student population that has huge range of English ability. I know in Texas Spanish has given the schools a lot of trouble.
“I don’t see a big advantage to teaching core classes in English” - not a single person I’ve met out of college can properly communicate Math and Science concepts. you don’t see a problem?
compare this to say Singapore or Philippines. I’m not talking about being Shakespeare. I’m talking about say explaining Newton’s first law of motion.
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