Time and time again the questions I am asked by my students is: “How can I improve my English?” and “Why am I getting nowhere?” Given that most of these people are graduate students with plans of doing post-graduate study abroad, I am often tempted to think their questions are disingenuous – merely an attempt to make conversation. Surely someone who has already been through sixteen or more years of schooling really knows at heart what is needed to learn something as mundane as a language. Indeed, many of these inquirers do secretly know and are just expressing their frustration at being too lazy to meet the requirements, but then I remind myself that notions of what learning involves are often quite different here and that many students are in fact stumped as to why they are making such little progress despite trying so hard. Assuming that the ease with which people learn English varies widely (because let’s face it – some adults are poor at picking up new languages, while others excel at it), in my experience the general reason for Taiwanese students’ failures to improve their English skills is as follows.

Blame it on the rote nature of the education system here or whatever you want, but, basically, there is an entrenched passivity to most Taiwanese English learners. And this does not just mean that they are too shy to speak in class. What it really means is that they do not actively wade in and dig through the language, but instead wait for it to be handed to them in neat little packages, in formulas. In practical terms this amounts to the fact that most students do not learn from their mistakes, so bad habits become ingrained. Why? There may be many reasons, but the one that comes across most strongly from my students is that they really just do not care enough. Their motivation to learn English is mostly extrinsic – for advanced studies or work – so there is no real interest in the language itself. Without a genuine sense of curiosity in the mechanics, the nitty gritty, of a language, it is very difficult for adults to learn it properly. Until adult Taiwanese students stop thinking of learning English as an irritating stepping stone along their career path, the general standard of English will not improve.

To find examples of passive student behaviour, one doesn’t need to look far. Consistently, when students are corrected, on, say, the use of a preposition, during or after an English utterance they show no interest at all in why their choice of preposition was incorrect or in what kind of situation their choice would have been correct. Then, within a matter of minutes they invariably make the same mistake again. The only way for adults to learn English is to get in there and play with the language, make mistakes and learn through trial and error. But this means you have to be curious; you have to care about what you are doing. I can understand how students might be reticent to experiment in front of their peers, but the fact is that most of them do not even contemplate these errors in the safety of their homes. This is no more evident than in the way writing corrections are treated. I am very rarely approached by students and asked to explain the corrections I have made to their written work and, similarly, if symbols are used to indicate where errors are so that students can make their own corrections, the paper is almost never re-submitted. Does this mean that students are aware of their mistakes and have learnt from them? Definitely not, judging from the fact that the very same mistakes reappear in the next piece.

Perhaps a single example from our school best sums up the problem with adult Taiwanese learners of English. For about a year now, we have offered a free half hour one-on-one tutorial service for our students. The rules are simple: in addition to their regular (paid for) classes students can take an half hour tutorial with a teacher, provided, and here is the catch, they formulate on their own specific, discrete language inquires. In all this time, less than five students have availed themselves of this service and of these students half have not been able to come up with better questions than things like: “How can I make my speaking more fluent?” or “How can I pick up more of what is said when I listen to fast paced conversations?” Call it passivity, call it laziness, indifference or lack of imagination and subscribe it to the educational background or even the influence of L1 on L2, but this attitude, which makes students content to listen to conversations and read passages for only understanding of content and meaning rather than linguistic complexity, and speak and write with the goal of just getting across the message, is what stands between Taiwanese students and greater English language proficiency.