English Learning and Teaching in Taiwan

“English Learning and Teaching in Taiwan: Theory and Practice of Communicative Language Teaching” examined the extent to which the communicative approach is implemented in the English classroom in senior high school in Taiwan. It also investigated senior high school students’ attitudes towards English learning at school. This book employed a combination of a dominant quantitative approach and a less-dominant qualitative data aggregation procedure. Data were collected through focus group interviews, classroom observations, and questionnaire. The findings reveal that the traditional approach, which focuses on the teaching of vocabulary, grammar and the explanation of the textbook contents, still prevails in the English classroom. Teachers’ classroom practices reflect students’ current learning purpose of achieving good exam results. Despite their short-term need of passing exams, the majority of students hold positive attitudes towards more communicative-based language teaching or activities in class. Accordingly, English teaching in school needs to help achieve students’ long-term goal, which is to develop the ability to use English in the real situation outside of the classroom.