If you've ever been in an English classroom in Taiwan, you may find the following scene familiar. As you walk in, you find the desks lined up in columns facing the teacher, platform and blackboard.
The teacher is explaining lots of words, phrases, grammar and sentence structures by lecturing, while the students are busy filling their books or notebooks with many English and Chinese words.
The class looks awfully neat and disciplined, doesn't it? However, the teaching effectiveness is really questionable because it is not very student-centered and students depend on the teacher all the time, waiting for instructions such as repeating, reading aloud, translating sentences, answering perfunctory questions and so on.
If we agree that English is best learnt through communication and interaction, making students work together in pairs or groups is one of the best interpersonal approaches in the classroom. Group work usually means groups of six students or less, with the optimal number being three or four.
As mentioned above, many teachers lecture to teach English, making students feel that learning English is like learning math instead of a language for daily communication. In many cases, the teacher, not students, is the one doing most of the talking in the classroom.
From the perspective of learning theory, student learning retention (how much students remember after two weeks) is only about 5 percent when taught by lecturing. Only 5 percent! No wonder many teachers complain that they work so hard to teach every sentence in the texts but students still can't remember them.
The reason is simple: students don't initiate conversations or actively take part in learning; on the contrary, they are just passive learners, receiving knowledge by only listening to the teacher. It is likely that the low participation rate in the classroom accounts for the low learning retention.
Conversely, students' higher involvement in the English learning process yields higher retention of the material.
For example, research shows that students' retention rates are much higher when they work together, such as in group discussion (50 percent) and cooperative learning (75 percent), compared with traditional teaching methods like lecturing and reading. Thus, teachers should facilitate students' learning by getting them to work together, instead of mostly talking.
Most teachers (myself included) tend to talk too much in the classroom, without allowing enough time for students to respond to them or to initiate talking. However, if we as teachers realize that no matter how hard we try, the efficacy of lecturing is very limited, then we should make students work together in groups as much as possible.
Research has made the surprising finding that individual student practice time can increase five-fold over traditional methodology if even only half of the English class time is spent on group work. Therefore, the greatest advantage of group work is the amount of English output produced by each student. We all know that output is no less important than input since most of us learn how to speak English by actually speaking it. The more students use English in communication, the more they will acquire communicative competence.
In addition to less dependence on the teacher and more individual output, working together has many advantages. When working together, students can exchange their ideas and learn from each other.
The atmosphere of group discussion also makes them feel more secure and less anxious, and builds up their confidence and motivation in using English. Most importantly, they feel that they use English in a meaningful and authentic way, instead of learning English in a monotonous and decontextualized way. All of these can enhance students' English use via interaction and communication.
Note that English teachers cannot simply assign students a topic and then let them discuss it without any preparation. Getting students to work together is no less laborious (though much more effective) than the traditional method.
Teachers have to plan well for any interactive activities before getting started. Teachers need to give students explicit instructions and model the activities, teach them collaborative skills, and orchestrate and time the entire procedure.
While students are working together, teachers should walk around (instead of sitting at the front grading papers), listen in on as many groups as possible and take notes to give students feedback later.
Letting students work together not only helps English teachers better cope with larger classes but also effectively facilitates students' English learning through a communicative and fun way.
Kao Shih-fan is an assistant professor at Jinwen University of Science and Technology.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
I have heard people equate the government’s stance on resisting forced unification with China or the conditional reinstatement of the military court system with the rise of the Nazis before World War II. The comparison is absurd. There is no meaningful parallel between the government and Nazi Germany, nor does such a mindset exist within the general public in Taiwan. It is important to remember that the German public bore some responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust. Post-World War II Germany’s transitional justice efforts were rooted in a national reckoning and introspection. Many Jews were sent to concentration camps not
RSS