Ouch—so pertaining to NTNU?
If scandals are your thing, here’s one from last year more closely tied to university admissions and international students in Taiwan:
Guy
I am not a lover of scandals, but I gave you all I knew about 臺師大 vis-à-vis the current uni gossip.
There are other obvious cases of exploitation at both high tier public and low tier private unis. BJ4.
Let’s just say “international students” address a critical international university ranking criterion. This can compensate for lack of research grants and other criteria.
???
Damn I really do need a translator to converse with you. : D
Guy
BJ4 sounds like 不解釋. It means he’s not gonna explain it/go into detail.
Thank you Madam.
Guy
Yes. This is the correct interpretation. I may have assimilated a tad too much. Point is, I’d be revealing too much by explaining in greater detail. Risky to me.
Elite uni’s are hard to get into. Fulbright is not 
A 3.0 GPA and college diploma are literally their only standards. They don’t even have an interview process beyond your own school interviewing you so they can write a nice letter of rec for you. What uni doesn’t want as many Fulbright recipients as humanly possible? They’re hardly not going to write the most glowing letters of rec ever for everyone.
I mean, probably. But if yer gunna learn a language, you gotta learn to pronounce the words. There’s no way around that. Either you learn English or you don’t. If they want to waste their time with KK, fine, but learn it properly. I can’t run around say “shh-ay shh-ay” without being laughed at by people who have taken the time to learn proper Chinese, why should relatively advanced Taiwanese English learners get a pass when they say “EE-tah EE-sah-uh bEEg-uh pEEg-uh”? (“it is a big pig”) Eventually you need to learn the difference between a long and short vowel sounds and that consonant-final words are consonant-final words/ don’t have an extra “uh” at the end.
In my experience, yes. People who have had to work at some point in their life are going to work harder than those at the top. However, there is a bottom. If your schools growing up were awful, there’s a chance you lack the basic skills to communicate at the level necessary after secondary school. A lot of professors I’ve known over the years have been shocked by how little their students understood the most basic of grammar conventions because they really never were taught them. Once you’ve reached uni, it’s a lot harder. How many young adults have you tried to teach English to that sorta have a background but really don’t know how to use English for anything beyond “hello!”?
I’m learning English and Chinese without learn to pronounce the words so much, and it is practical enough for me.
Are you saying that if someone asked you to read any of your posts aloud, you wouldn’t be able to do so?
if I read a random post aloud, I’m sure you don’t understand more than half of what I’m saying without the post, especially if the post includes terms like pneumonia.
As someone with a background in linguistics, I must say I find this fascinating, considering how eloquent your posts seem to be.
One of the major reasons I struggle with reading Chinese is that I can’t “hear” a character in my head if I don’t know it and I struggle to move on and use my context clues/ move on when that happens. Goes against what I teach my own students to do with English, but at least they can sound out most words…
A linguistics professor explained to me that all the guessing from context techniques we teach are nonsense. Supposedly the brain switches off if it hears a word it doesn’t know as it struggles to understand the word.
The trouble is students don’t want to hear that they need to build their vocabulary through reading.
I’ve assigned some sound to each word or character, but it is often completely different from its correct pronunciation.
I don’t about the “techniques” but guessing from context is definitely a thing. How else do we learn our mother tongue then?
How did you learn English? Self study books?
Our discussion was regarding standard test preparation listening techniques. Yes, of course, simple words can easily be guessed from context if they are heard individually or in a very short chunk. When you don’t what a complex word means it’s virtually impossible.
“Chair” say is easy. “Methene emissions have been increasing in recent years” isn’t.
This is going to go so far from the question about university admissions standards, but mods can feel free to move it
Once upon a time, a group of people claiming to be “experts” came up with some “literacy” programs that became very popular in American schools that makes the whole concept of guessing from context clear as mud.
They had an awful set of rules that teachers were supposed to teach about “being a good reader” to the tune of “good readers always…” One of those “rules” was that “good readers guess from context”. The problem with this strategy is that students have been taught to guess what a word might be based on context, not to sound it out as the relatively phonetic English language rules dictate. They even taught teachers to cover words in sentences of stories they were reading and have the students guess what the next word would be. For example, it might say “I like to ride my ____” and the students were to guess “bike”, by looking at the picture and deciding that it must be a “bike”. What happens when the word is “bicycle”? The students don’t learn to sound it out and don’t think sounding things out matters. So they encounter a word like "pony” and say “horse”, because they see a picture of a horse, and what’s the difference, right?
But what happens when there aren’t any pictures anymore? The above linked story actually reported that adults struggle with reading into adulthood when taught this way. There is also evidence that covering the words is stupid and delays the brain’s natural ability to pick up on new words when they are presented that way in context. It’s why it’s more effective to learn a second language when the words are presented in the context of a story or article than in a list of words. (you listening, oh “experts” writing Taiwanese English textbooks???)
This is exactly what happens when my students here in Taiwan say “那個 “b” 開頭的那個單詞”. They see “b” and an image of kid riding a bike and they know it must mean 脚踏車, but they only know “bike”, even though the word on the page is “bicycle”. They’re taught to guess from context and they often guess wrong. I just had students today saying “draw” when the word was “paint” because they didn’t know “paint” and saw the image of a paintbrush and came to their own conclusions. “It’s the same thing, right?” Well, they’re close, but they’re not the same. For starters, they don’t even start or end with the same letters. But if I take the time to point it out, I get eye rolls and my co-teacher telling me that I’m wasting time. Oh no I ain’t.
They also never learn use their phonics understanding because Taiwanese English textbooks think that even though American schools that do teach phonics are usually teaching them throughout the curriculum from K- grade 3, and even though American students are being exposed to English for at least the 8 hours that they’re in school every day, Taiwanese kids must be so much smarter that they can learn English phonics in the first two 40 minute classes of 3rd grade, which is what 康軒 quite seriously suggests from it’s presentation of the text.
This “guess from context without phonics” is a huge no-no for absolutely anyone on Earth learning to read English, native speaker or not. You NEED explicit phonics instruction because eventually you’re not going to have pictures of things above your words, not to mention words that you couldn’t possibly know already, such as most adjectives or vocab in an advanced science class.
But knowing to guess from context when you understand the phonics is possible. For example, I was reading a news report and it had “octogenarian”. I consider myself to have a decent vocabulary, but I’d never encountered that word before. Were I one of my students, I would have thrown my hands in the air, declared the article too hard, and given up. But I could also 1) guess based on context (they’re talking about old people, so maybe this word has to do with old people?) 2) think about what I do know from certain parts of the word (“oct” means 8, so maybe they’re talking about 80 year olds? “genar” looks like “generation”) or 3) look it up in a dictionary. Or of course do a combination of all three.
That’s learning in context. But I needed to know how to sound out the word to make the conclusions and actually learn the new word.
As for the brain switching off, I don’t buy it. Supposedly the most effective way to teach new vocabulary in a language classroom (besides in context) is by using it in a listening/speaking context repeatedly before ever seeing it written down. Once the brain has processed the audio information, it can pick it up even better when it sees it in print.
I also don’t buy the “brain switching off” part. Doesn’t consist with my own experience. You hear a word you don’t understand, you’ll probably forget it after a while. But if you hear it often enough, you’ll remember it and remember when to use it. Sometimes you’re not clear what it actually means, or the subtle difference from a similar word, but if you have enough exposure to the word then you’ll eventually get it, even without looking up the dictionary. This is how most of us learn mother language. I don’t think we understand what everything means.
I’m pretty surprised by this. I had some psychology training and believe everyone assigns a sound to each word when learning a language unless you’re deaf from birth. I’ve never yet met a person who could learn to use a language properly without the sound assigning.
I’m guessing you’re also doing this but just not with the correct English/mandarin pronunciation? My question is, why not learn the actual pronunciation if you’re going assign a sound to it anyway?
I always insist my students to learn the correct pronunciation. It’s okay to have an accent but at least you have to let people understand you. Teaching or even just simply speaking English has been very frustrating to me here. I don’t know why but ppl seem to just hate speaking English. And perhaps it’s because I’m pretty much Taiwanese physically speaking, when I don’t understand them, they think I’m pretentious. But I learned my English at a very young age from mostly Americans and this one Taiwanese tutor with beautiful American accent, I’d never talked to any Taiwanese in English until my late twenties. I don’t think it’s my fault that I didnt understand it when both was pronounced like b-au-th. First I thought it was boss. But the th sound was so intentionally it couldn’t have been ss. So then I asked ppl what it means, and they said it means all the two of them. And after I did some thinking, I figured it was both. And I said oh both, okay i get it now. But it’s a big no no here. I was just glad I understand what people are talking about. But they’d take it the other way. They think I was pretending I didn’t understand the word and was making fun of them. In my defense, both is always both to me, with the long o sound. I’ve never heard a person pronounced it like boss. How should I know what you’re talking about?
And the teaching is also… exhausting. Half of my class don’t care about the pronunciation. And I’ve never yet met a student whose English is fluent enough for me to understand. And I just can’t accept their money and not teach them properly. It’s not gonna do you any harm to learn how to speak English!! Actually most Taiwanese could pronounce it well with proper training.
I talked to a friend about this phenomenon. I thought it might have something to do with the education. There’s no science or logic training here. All we got is paper work and memory test. Very often we should write down the answer taught in school, even when it’s wrong. If you write the correct answer, you wouldn’t get any point. Cuz that’s not how it’s taight in school. This is how they learn not to question the system. I think I posted something about 指鹿為馬 in other threads. It’s quite similar.
I think most ppl have noticed that we don’t ask questions in public here. I believe this is why. The society, not just the school, has taught us that if a student doesn’t learn well, it must be their own problem, because the old system is perfect and it’s impossible to have any problem.
Anyways, so when students are not doing good enough ( I’m talking Taiwanese standards), they think it’s because they are bad and don’t deserve anything good. So interesting things happen. When you tell them there’s room to improve, they think what you’re actually saying is that they suck at it and don’t deserve the A they just got.
It makes it really hard to teach anything to them. I have this friend who’s got a 7 out of 9 from ielts. This is a decent score can nauseating that even native speakers couldn’t get the highest score without training. I don’t know why designed the test this way though. Anyway She asked me to correct her sentences/pronunciation in conversations so she could speak better English. So I told her that she confused dark L with mandarin ㄡ/ㄛ and most Americans would guess that she’s saying o. Ask a Taiwanese student to say temple and tempo and you’ll know what I’m saying. And she was sooooooo upset about it she started saying something like “I suck at English” and I didn’t know what to do. I’ve learned to nod through English conversation with Taiwanese and don’t ask any questions. But she asked me to say something. I mean I didn’t mention anything through the years, I could have easily not said anything for another decade. She asked me to!! Well anyways I comforted her and finally she learned to pronounce dark l. It’s just… I don’t understand the struggle. I wasn’t saying she was bad, I was saying that if she wanted to improve, she could start from the Ls. If it were me I would love to have people correcting me, politely, of course. I once pronounced hippopotamus wrong in a class and I was really happily and thankful that a student pointed it out. Otherwise I would keep saying hippopo-tat-mus for the rest of my life. (I didn’t have proper English education since some point in grade school, but it’s already enough for me to deal with all the thesis writing and toiec and ielts tests. Occasionally I pronounce something wrong, but it’s not like the natives don’t do that. A lot of Taiwanese people pronounced 租賃 Wrong too. This doesn’t mean someone is an incompetent language user.)
This happens to my students too. They pay you to learn better, but they don’t want you to tell them there’s room to improve because that means they’re not good enough and that means “bad” here in taiwan. So they would try everything to get out of it.
I might be complaining a bit. Or a lot. It’s been really hard for me. I’ll insist on teaching proper English but it’s just not easy…
Btw I’m typing from my phone so there might be a lot of typo :-p
More bad press for universities in Taiwan, this time related to the mistreatment of students from Uganda.
Guy