Bob:
The Basic Achievement Test for Junior High Students (BAT) 國中基本學力測驗 test is all multiple choice, standard stuff. The readings may vary, though: you have reading passages, at least one menu, a schedule or something “realistic”, one or two dialogues, etc. Topics may vary but they like to keep them fresh: Wang Yien-ming, or whoever is in fashion, etc…
Yes, they can take the test again. That is why you see different versions on the BCTest website in Shida. You have the mock practice tests, the real thing, the backup…
I know that as a teacher it sounds kind of weird to teach students just reading -regardless of their ability in the other language skills. Nevertheless, as non-natives in a TEFL environment, we used to do the same thing back home, as it is the cheapest/fastest method for testing. We did a special course for engineering/science/economics, etc. whatever, who in general did not need to speak at work, but in high probability had to read a lot of materials in English. They could understand and write efficiently, but spoken English was not even touched. That is what they needed, and we gave them that.
As to what objectives they have here in Taiwan, I think it is difficult to match what you write on the MOE’s program designs and what happens in the classroom, since the teachers were trained on the “one book as Bible for testing” mentality. Too many kids to start with, and the system also kicks out the ones who cannot pay for bushiban, so if they can’t prepare for teh tests, the students become disheartened and quit.
I was telling my boss, whose daughter goes to a school that uses Longman’s textbook, to buy the Joy books and start studying from them. If this is the “annoited one”, then topics/vocab most probably will come from it. This I do not know as a fact, but I would bet money on it.
I will repeat here most of the explanation I gave Charlie about the textbooks and their relationship with the tests (please feel free to correct or add):
By “one book” I meant that the Ministry of Education published a book, if memory serves me right it was one for each school level: book 1, 2 and 3 for Junior High 1, 2 and 3. This same book was publihes in the 70’s late 80’s and was used as a Bible for many years. this was way before they started teaching English in primary schools.
For Senior High there was only Far East, same thing, books 1,2 and 3 for Senior High 1,2, and 3.
Then in 2001 the Government decided to “liberalize” the market; that is, the printing companies could come up with their versions of the English textbook -as was in other subjects- and sell it to the schools. At the beginning, there were like 8 big houses that got the lion’s share. Now, after the competition is over, one went broke, one quit, and there are like 5-3 options to choose from -and the foreign companies associated with local publishers, of course.
Parents have complained all along, as the kids do not know which book to study from, it is too expensive to buy all of them, and they did not know which word list to study from. Again, there have been changes in the word lists, and not everyone knows which is the real deal.
You see, this is big business, not only in terms of quantity of textbooks, but rather of the “additional materials”, like practice books, test practice books, vocab and reading books… Furthermore, to make them more attractive, they started mixing the high school test prep with GEPT prep and here comes the mess…
The textbooks themselves have been “edited” several times, at cost cutting practices -meaning they change the cover, don’t change the inside much.
So what I called “open choice” was actually “open market” or not imposing a single book -in theory. As you can see, there is a leap from there to practice. The policy says “one outline, multiple textbook editions”, meaning there should be choices of textbooks, based on the “outline” or program (word lists, learning objectives, etc) set by MOE . This has proven to be neither accurate nor practical in real life.
Hence you have this movement by the old guard (most teachers are quite conservative, anyway) to go back to “one book as Bible for test”. Seems things are moving in that direction.
