國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
Part I: What is English?
First Impression of English:
“I was happy in the English class, and there were lots of stories in the textbook.”
In the beginning of Erin’s experience, she needed to first of all make sense of what English is. Erin was born in 1990. When she attained elementary school, the new curriculum guideline, Grade 1-9 Curriculum Guideline, was just implemented.
Students began to take English class in 3rd grade, twice a week. Her impression of English classes then was mostly about storytelling, and she considered the classes playful and interesting.
I did not go to cram schools for English learning. I started to take English class in 3rd or 4th grade. […] I was happy then. I remember [one lesson] in the textbook is a story about an alien, an alien coming to the earth and wants to be friends with people, something like that, and everything was in English. […] I liked English and thought it fun at that time.
Erin did not remember much about English learning then in elementary school, but she clearly found learning English less enjoyable after going to junior high school.
In junior high, English learning equals memorization for Erin. To deal with lots of vocabulary quizzes and unit tests, she needed to memorize vocabulary. She did not understand why she needed to spend so much time studying a language she would not
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
use in daily life; she also found it meaningless to memorize English words just to pass exams:
I am not a person who likes memorizing things. If the subjects are taught in Chinese, such as Chinese, History, or Geography, it would not take much time to study after school since I am familiar with the language, and I can memorize the contents very quickly. English, however, you have to memorize [the vocabulary].
After you go home you have to spend time memorizing [it], and I am the kind of person who is lazy about memorizing [things].
The more Erin felt it wasting of time memorizing vocabulary, the more unwilling she became to study, and hence the poorer performance she had. Hardly
understanding the teacher’s lecture and not being able to catch up with her class mates, Erin gradually developed a resistant attitude toward English learning, and a vicious circle therefore formed. The situation became worse when she went to senior high school.
Falling in the gap:
“Is my life all about learning English? I am DONE3 with it.”
Attending high school, Erin’s perception of English changed sharply from dislike to hate. “It was in high school that I started to hate English. I hated to study English
3 Capitalized letters are used from time to time in chapter 4. This is to mark the participant’s manner of speaking, such as emphasizing an event, or to capture the participant’s emotion, like being anxious, nervous, passionate, extremely unsatisfied, or overjoyed.
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
very, very much,” said she with contempt. She sensed a great gap between junior high and senior high school, in terms of the difficulty level of vocabulary and grammar.
What was worse, the loading of schoolwork increased. Not just English, she basically had trouble with all the subjects, and her academic performance usually ranked second or third from the last. High school was a high-stressed learning environment for Erin, and she did not have better performance after a year of attempting to adjust.
She even thought about dropping out of school. Among all the subjects, Erin hated English most. She took an extreme action to avoid English studying by deliberately skipping the first period of English class every Tuesday morning for the whole spring semester in 11th grade:
I lied to the teacher that I needed to go to the hospital for the check-up for my wrist pain every Tuesday morning so that I could skip the class. I could not let my parents know about this, so I would leave home on time, take a bus and wonder around, and enter the school around 8:30. Then, I would hide in the bathroom, wait until 9:00 when the English class finished, and entered the classroom. Crazy, right?
Further discussing why she hated English so much, Erin mentioned two factors:
the heavy workload and her English teacher’s teaching attitude. In high school, Erin needed to not only study the vocabulary, grammar and the reading texts in the textbook, but also the teacher-assigned self-learning English magazines as
supplementary out-of-class reading materials. In addition, there was a 4000-word
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
vocabulary book waiting for her to memorize. Erin asked herself, “Is my life all about learning English? Don’t I need to study other subjects? Why on earth do you think you have the right to ask me to study so much English?” She actually shouted out loud her negative emotions as she recounted the experience during our interview at her home. Since she almost gave up on English in the tenth grade, it was more difficult for her trying to catch up with other classmates later on:
We needed to study one to two pages of the self-learning English magazine every day, but the materials were quite hard for me. […] It might be enough for others to spend five to ten minutes on studying the magazine, but it would take me at least thirty minutes or even an hour to finish an article. How would I want to do that?
Erin felt swamped with English vocabulary, grammatical points, and reading materials that she could hardly breathe, not to mention that there were other subjects waiting in line to be studied. She became more and more reluctant to invest time on English, and the result was that she failed English for four consecutive semesters during tenth and eleventh grade.
In addition to the heavy study load, her English teachers’ attitudes also brought her negative experiences with English. She indicated a paradox that high school English teachers would not teach many grammatical points since they believed most of the grammatical knowledge had already been taught in junior high school, and students must have mastered it. They often chose to skip grammar completely. “I did
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
know those grammar points, but the problem is that I had not mastered them,” said Erin with laughters.
Another English teacher Erin had happened to be the homeroom teacher of the English-talented class in school. Erin thought that the teacher could never put herself in low-achievers’ shoes and did not understand how they felt about English learning since the teacher had always been successful in her own language learning. Erin even felt that she was already given up by the teacher because she showed pejorative attitude toward her, thinking that she was helpless, and there was no chance for her to learn English well.
Not only English, she was basically struggling in all the subjects in her first year in high school. Later, it was her interests in History and Geography that made her take her academic performance seriously, but still, she put English aside, completely out of her mind.
During the time I was preparing for the college entrance exam, I could do a sample test on History answering three hundred practice questions a day, but I never studied English. I didn’t want to memorize a word. I didn’t even want to open the book.
The consequence is that she was defeated in the battle of college entrance exam, scoring only 18 out of the total 100 points on the subject of English. “I was incapable of and unwilling to read the questions, so I just guessed. I think the grade is pretty much acceptable,” said Erin, laughing out loud.
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y