Good job, English teachers.
I’m sure the mods can find a thread to put this under.
I find it hard to believe… Out of all countries that don’t speak English I’ve been to, I’ve encountered the least amount of english speakers here. At least in Japan almost everyone knew a few simple things but even India has way better English than here 
I think India should be 2nd to the Philippines if anything…
Maybe the students aren’t reflective of the general public or something.
Taiwan’s TOEIC writing and speaking scores rank 2nd in Asia
Correction: somehow Taiwanese children are better at passing a test that is focused around using the most complicated and convoluted language possible, rather than the language that native speakers actually use, than, say, Japanese or Korean students.
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Really ? No way!
Don’t say too much or you will end up crashing the multi-milion if not billion dollar English cramming school business.
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There’s a spoken test too.
But you’re right, English teachers suck at their jobs.
How is Taiwan ahead of Singapore? That’s imposibru
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Yea, because this is the most offensive thing I’ve ever said about Taiwan’s English industry…
And the spoken test is based very much on what someone decided is “most advanced” English. I’ve seen many prep videos/“say this not that” videos online. It is ridiculous the things that are “too simple” in the eyes of their graders. Most of it you’d hear in an interview with The Queen, but I would never call that “advanced” English, just very overthought.
My arse.
They would rather pass a test and boast about ‘Taiwan second highest english aptitude in asian’
Than actually be able to speak english. Applies to a lot of things here.
You can see the test scores referred to here:
The results report on the level of English of the test takers. It doesn’t report on English aptitude of their locations as referred to in this thread title.
TW has the second highest score in Asia, HK has the lowest. TW scores higher than the Netherlands, people can do their own math after that I guess.
Well done to the people who took that test, looks like they blew it out of the water. However that is not a measure of the English level generally in Taiwan.
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In other words, these results are worthless. Hong Kong has the worst English in Asia? 
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It’s like AP calculus, which stands for Asian Pride calculus. If white people take that test, that’s cultural appropriation.
If HK scored the lowest in Asia and the Taiwanese who took the test did better than people in the Netherlands, I’m going to say that it’s not a measure of English levels at all…
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It’s a measure of the levels of the people who took the test. TOEIC is cheaper and easier than IELTS, but IELTS is more useful. Also, the Taiwanese government has been pushing university students to take any test for the past few years, with some universities giving cash bonuses for good scores.
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For that test in the Netherlands for example you could be talking about migrants from Ukraine or the Middle East or wherever resident in the Netherlands and applying to Dutch Universities. Like it is going to depend heavily on what demographic is taking the test.
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What about in HK? their English is much better than Taiwanese peoples imo.
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The Dutch mostly speak good enough English already that most wouldn’t need the test. To gonto England they’d do IELTS.
Again, most of them wouldn’t need to take a test. The ones who need the test would probably do IELTS.
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My first guess would be that it is the results for people who took the test at a HK testing centre. According to diagratticalismical set theory this would not necessarily be representative of the population of Hong Kong.
I don’t know about other English teachers, but I’ll stipulate that I’m no good at my job.
But over time, I’ve noticed that some of my students, and at least one former student, have engaged me in fairly extended spontaneous conversations. It’s not the Queen’s English, but they can communicate.
I began to notice that sort of thing when my landlady’s nephew, by then an adult, but a former student at the cram school that I’d worked at a few years earlier, used to come around to collect the rent for his aunt. After a few conversations with him, I realized that we weren’t having any serious problems communicating with each other, and that our communications were not just about rent, but about various subjects, some of them of a truly conversational nature.
And I think a lot of this seems to have to do with the “shoveling,” as I call it, that the non-native-speaker teachers in my immediate environment have done over a course of years. That is, they’ve just shoveled and shoveled and shoveled English into these kids’ brains, until finally some of the kids, maybe a pretty good proportion of them, can communicate in that language, to one degree or another.
So regardless of the quality of the teachers–especially the old vagrant writing this post–Taiwan’s efforts to get people up to snuff on English seem to be bearing fruit in my tiny corner of the island. It’s a long haul thing, but to me, it seems to be worthwhile.
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Test scores and reality are rarely even remotely close to the same thing…people get confused because they are blind slaves to the university racket 
Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong etc lol. Nevermind places like Guam or Palau.
Taiwan does, however, like to spend loads of funds to boost its ego on frivolous back patting awards that literally NO one either cares, nor knows, about except for the businesses selling this certificate/prize/trophy and the poor fools running education farms trying to trick future customers into thinking they are good at what they do 
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