Page 21 - ELG1705 May Issue 447

CLAIRE MONO Natives may not
DATA & ANALYSIS

have the answer

mproving the communicative skills of listening
and speaking is the main focus of British-style
Icommunicative teaching. Enrolment in private
language schools is high across East Asia and
most parents insist on native-speaker ‘teachers’,
so how can New Oriental be right in thinking
that Celta-trained teachers are not the answer?
Most teachers in Taiwan, Korea and Japan
are Americans, and very few of them have
Celtas. Many of them are not trained at all
before they arrive, and those that are trained,
are likely to follow Krashen’s comprehensible
input hypothesis, where learners hear and read
simplified language, and are under no pressure
to speak. Vietnam, where the UK and Australia
seem to be the big players in the market, is an
exception. But if Celta-style communicative
teaching is more common there, it is not
effective in promoting speaking. Vietnamese
comparative scores for speaking are the second
to those in other Chinese- 0.1 other country to show this Europe and Latin America, but the Ielts scores
lowest of all Ielts markets.
Communicative teaching predominates in
show that the receptive skills of listening and
profile of mainland Chinese
reading are stronger than the productive ones.
for reading than speaking have Latin languages:
speaking regions. As Table profile. Most of the countries which have higher scores
While Chinese speakers
1 shows, the skills profile The lowest difference outside the mainland Columbia, France, Italy and Spain. An Italian
of mainland China is quite between speaking generally have stronger teacher told us that reading is easier ‘because
unlike that of Singapore and and writing is on language skills than the written English, especially academic English,
the other Chinese-speaking mainland China rest of East Asia, by contrast uses more Latin words, and the way English
regions. mainland students have is pronounced makes even those words more
All Chinese test-takers score most proportionately lower scores in difficult to follow when you’re listening’.
strongly in the two receptive skills, reading listening and, more especially, speaking In fact the countries with the strongest
and listening. Both Hong Kong and Singapore than do students from other countries. communicative skills have little exposure to
have listening as their strongest skill and only According to New Oriental, mainland communicative teaching or to native-speakers.
students from mainland China score higher students object to being made to listen and Every country in the Indian subcontinent has
on reading than listening. The mainland also speak in English, but exposure to spoken higher scores in oral/aural skills, though visa
shows the lowest difference between speaking English is the very factor which seems to help restrictions mean there are few native-speaker
and writing, with only 0.1 point between them. other Chinese speakers to excel. Traditional teachers. Iran has had no native-speaker
Exposure to English is extremely high in teaching delivered in L1 is unlikely to provide teachers for forty years and still scores highest on
Singapore, where English-medium education is the solution to this skills gap. It is up to Jocelyn oral/aural skills. Judging from the evidence from
compulsory, and high in Hong Kong, where it Wang and her colleagues to come up with a the Ielts results, simply hiring native-speaker
is popular. Chinese-style answer. teachers with Celtas is not an instant solution to
It is low to medium in Taiwan, where English the problem of improving communicative skills.
medium education is rare, although enrolment
in private language schools and insistence on
native-speaker teachers, largely American
and often untrained, is high. So, perhaps low
exposure to English is the area to look at.
Mainland China shares similar educational
cultures to the other East Asian countries.
Of the three largest markets, Korea has
low-to-medium amounts of English in the
environment, while Japan and Vietnam, like
China, have very little.
As we can see from Table 2, however,
mainland China still remains at the bottom.
Vietnam may benefit from having a romanised
alphabet for both reading and writing. And Mainland (total score: 5.7)
apart from speaking, Japan’s results are the Vietnam (total score : 6)
same as China’s. Mainland China is the only Korea (total score: 5.9)
place where there is only a 0.1 point difference Japan (total score: 5.8)
between the writing score and the speaking
score on Academic Ielts, although Vietnam
has just 0.2. India, which also has a speaking
score 0.2 points above writing, is the only
Table 2: IELTS Skills profile East Asia (other)

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