Taiwan Junior High English Teaching

Giving a big picture of the setting, lesson planning strategies, and competency-based teaching practices for Taichung FET orientation

 JH English Teaching Practices

The workshop's goal is for the native-speaking English teachers to have a basic understanding of Taiwan's junior high English education. By knowing how Taiwanese students are learning the language in the classroom, these teachers can think about what they can help to motivate students to use English in a more meaningful context. 

Grammar translation remains the most dominant teaching approach in such a test-driven environment. To better help prepare students with the senior high entrance exam, rote memorization of sentence patterns and vocabulary words, complete with loads of mechanical drills and mock tests, is still the most effective practice to get the job done. 

Competency-based Teaching 

With the implementation of the new national curriculum guidelines in 2019, teachers are facing many challenges, such as: How to translate these general principles into specific lesson designs? How do we know a class aligns with the English-domain guidelines? How to incorporate essential topics, such as human rights, gender equality, environmental protection, and so on, into our English class? 

We quickly went over some aspects regarding the guidelines, like competency-based teaching, goals of the curriculum, three domains and nine items, essential learning focuses, etc. Of course, I didn't intend to overwhelm these teachers with the details. Instead, I have developed my way of interpreting the indicators and putting them into practice in lesson planning strategies. 

Discussion and Activities     

To engage the teachers, I used many activities and tried not to lecture for more than ten minutes. For example, we talked about Backward Design and used my teaching practices to prompt the teachers to think about what kind of scaffolding we should include to help our students produce the end product collaboratively. Unlike most Taiwanese teachers, they enjoyed answering questions and exchanging ideas with each other. 

The dubbing activity seemed to resonate with some of the teachers. They said they'd like to steal my idea and give it a try in their class. 

Thanks to J's help, I rehearsed my presentation and gained feedback and many useful suggestions. For example, getting the teachers experiencing what it's like to learn a foreign language worked well with them.