Chapter 4 Results
4.2 Motivation of Learning and Teaching L2 Pragmatics in Taiwan
4.2.1 Extrinsic Motivation Factors
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Two important themes emerged during the data-gathering phase. They refer to the extrinsic and intrinsic motivation factors.
4.2.1 Extrinsic Motivation Factors
Exam-oriented teaching dominates the EFL contexts, especially in Asian countries, such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China and Hong Kong (Butler, 2004; Nunan, 2003).
This study reaffirms the popular belief that exam does exert a profound influence on student learning. The current study found the teaching-to-the-test effect the most prominent in secondary schools because students need to take the basic competence exams and joint college entrance exams (JCEE). To the best of the researcher’s
understanding, the teaching methods advocated in the ELT cannot address the concern of exam preparation; hence, secondary school teachers tend to favor teaching students test-taking strategies, vocabulary expansion and grammar development, some of which may cater to students’ extrinsic needs, but fail to arouse their interest in learning English (e.g., Chen, Warden & Chang, 2005).
The student interviews showed that school exams play a major part in their English learning experience, and exam-oriented teaching has generated the most responses from the participants. For example:
I feel that people whose English is already good will become better and those who are
interested in English will continue to learn it well, even without studying abroad. But if you are pressured by exams, after the peak [12th grade] there won’t be any pressure and your ability will backslide. So I feel that the English-speaking environment matters.
She expressed that she was not as motivated as those students whose English was already good. In addition, she thought that some intrinsically motivated students were
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able to master English without studying abroad. Also, she reached her peak of English ability in high school due to the exam pressure, but she could not maintain her English ability without intrinsic motivation (e.g., Brown, 2007). She was concerned that the assessment aspect of learning English should correspond to teaching and learning in the classroom; otherwise, her English ability may decrease without exposure or pressure to learn English. As some students mentioned:
My English backslides and I re-learned English from the English alphabet. My high-school English teacher was an exam person [emphasis in original]. He asked us to read XYZ every day in 11th grade. In 12th grade, we memorized 10 to 20 words a day and read XYZ.
This student considered her high school English teacher to be an exam person. Her teacher would instruct her to read English magazines and memorized 10 to 20 words every day. As she continued to say, “…We read XYZ magazine, every week we took 2 to 3 English tests in addition to the textbook, so our English improved a lot, yeah, for exams, very exam-oriented practice.” It is worth mentioning that the XYZ magazine was
designed to prepare students for college entrance exams and the format of the magazines was customized to suit the needs of test-takers. Also, it has established a deep-rooted reputation that this magazine could improve students’ exam performance. As a
consequence, the simulated exams supplemented by the magazine were used to evaluate student learning. As for the four skills, listening and speaking appeared to be neglected;
reading and writing were mostly exam-based practice, such as:
In senior high school, I took the class for college entrance exams, taking simulated exams and writing test papers for reading and listening.
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It could be extrapolated that reading and writing were exam-oriented and test-taking strategies were taught to prepare students for college entrance exams. “In the 12th grade, I took the Exam Preparation Class for college entrance examination,” said one student. In fact, exam preparation started from junior high school, not from senior high school. As one student mentioned,
In junior high school, I was always attending classes to cope with the exams. Yeah. I am good at memorizing words.
The student attended English classes for exam preparation. As he mentioned, he was
“good at memorizing words.” It is implied that exams were considered to be vocabulary exams in that by learning the necessary words, students could handle the demands of the entrance exams. However, whether memorizing words alone could meet the demands of English exams remains to be seen since no claims have been made that memorizing words alone could answer all the language questions in the tests (e.g., Brown, 2007).
There may be others, such as grammar, discourse, and reading comprehension involving the use of learning strategies, which were not explicitly stated by the participant. One male participant stated that:
I took English classes for the short-term goal of taking the JCEE, attending a cram school near Taipei Railway Station. I suck at [emphasis in original] my speaking skills, English listening in particular. I took the intermediate exam of the GEPT. My oral exam was only 20% [emphasis in original], and it is quite sad.
The student expressed his insufficient listening and speaking ability, attributing his aural/oral failure to Joint College Entrance Examination (JCEE) in that the exam did not prepare test-takers for listening and speaking. He suffered from his failure to meet his
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own criteria of success. Although the JCEE exam includes writing, it was mentioned by some participants that the teaching of writing occurred due to the exam, saying: “I went to cram school in junior high school, mostly the one for exam preparation.” One student added: “Yeah, the teacher taught us writing for exams.” Another student remarked that “I feel that our school teachers only taught us how to take exams.” One student complained that:
Yeah. This [Taking exams] is very meaningless. I feel if you do this English is a dull subject, and students don’t want to learn. The pressure is so heavy that we don’t use English in our daily lives. The teacher taught English through Chinese, yeah and it is useless to teach us how to take the exams. The main thing is for students to apply English.
The student complained about the pressure to take the exams and considered English to be a dull subject in that all they did was to take the exams and they could not apply what they learned into practice. The functional and pragmatic use of the target language was not remembered whatsoever by the students in secondary schools. In fact, the effect of the test-taking atmosphere, such as the General English Proficiency Test (GEPT), has been so widespread that repeated mentions were made. One student remembered: “In fact, I was more familiar with English in junior high school, such as the General English Proficiency Test (GEPT).”
Another student also mentioned: “At that time, people took the GEPT, and TOEIC was not known by many people then. I thought that people who took the exams were good at English.” To illustrate, the GEPT test is divided into four skill sections—the preliminary test includes listening, reading, and the final test includes writing and speaking. In fact, the wash-back effect of taking the GEPT could be felt in junior high school. As one student mentioned:
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In junior high school, he [the teacher] played the radio and it resembled listening questions in the GEPT, 0.5 for each question, and 20 points in total.
Another student mentioned the test-taking phenomenon: “We are sort of the same.
We subscribed to English magazines. We were tested one article per week.” Through the English magazines, the teacher evaluated what students had learned. Every week, students had to be tested. Take listening for example. “The student needed to take the exams through the radio,” said one student.
To summarize, in secondary schools where the participants attended, it is not surprising that exams seemed to be a crucial factor that dominated the English language teaching, including listening, speaking, reading and writing. However, these tests did not, in fact, assess students’ pragmatic ability and most of the exams were form-focused or grammar and vocabulary-driven exams in nature, which de-emphasized the balance of form, meaning and context in the target language (Larsen-Freeman, 2000; Taguchi, 2011) or what Brown (2007) called the appropriateness in the social use of the target language.
As mentioned before, exam-oriented instruction was so manifest that all participants in the study unanimously pointed out the problem of regarding English as a subject for exams. However, to understand the learning environment in secondary schools, one student described:
The environment let us practice ABCD and memorize words and grammar and sentence structures and later we knew how to listen and read. I think the order is kind of against the natural order of language learning. The initial learning could be tedious.
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What students generally experienced includes memorizing words and grammar, and they practiced making sentences and altering sentence structures, mostly focusing on forms. In addition, this student protested against the artificial order of learning. He complained that “the initial learning could be tedious” because too much emphasis was on drills and sentence structures. On the contrary, some participants felt: “You need to be taught grammar and vocabulary, but you need to memorize vocabulary yourself.” She believed that grammar should be taught and she could memorize words independently. In teaching grammar, one male student contended that grammar was not considered as important as communication:
Every day is about new words. What this word means and how the grammar is used. I feel that English should be used for communication. When you communicate, you won’t think too much.
It is okay if your grammar is poor as long as people can understand you. The first point is this and the second point is about reading and writing. You don’t need to be always right with grammar unless you want to write thesis and novels, more formal ones. I don’t think grammar is that [emphasis in original] important.
He seemed to imply that communication should receive focal attention in language teaching and learning and spoken mode should prevail over written mode of
communication. As for grammar, he argued that it is not necessary “to be always right with grammar unless you want to write thesis and novels, more formal ones.” He does not think that grammar should receive paramount importance. The student preferred the immediate and spontaneous use of English to convey meanings, and he thought that advanced literacy skills could be enhanced later if needs arise. His assumption would be that practical use of the target language is prior to the overemphasis on linguistic accuracy.
Due to the exam-oriented teaching and form-focused instruction of English language
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teaching in secondary school in Taiwan, L2 pragmatics was, unfortunately, the least taught or the most neglected aspect in language teaching according to Canale and Swain’s (1980) communicative competence. In brief, the pedagogical foci were on grammar, test-taking strategies, and less on sociolinguistic dimension in the target language. The four-skill teaching is generally limited to entrance exam preparation.