For English Learner: As Long As Your Writing and Reading are "up", Your English is "up"?

“Um……well, I…..think……my favorite ……color is …..blue.” said one of my students in my first class last week. After class, he felt “relieved” because he could speak “Chinese” now. As a tutor, I wondered why children had such fear to speak English. Afterwards, I tried analyzing the reasons and found that it is Taiwan educational system to cause this phenomenon.
In Taiwan educational system, examination leads education. When children in Taiwan reach the age of learning, academic challenges begins. In the process of their growing-up, they have to do good grades to fulfill the elders’ expectations or their glory. When time goes by, they make the habit that if there is no exam in that subject, they will choose not to study, even get to know. That is, everything tested on paper is always noticed of. Soon, Taiwanese students only can answer multiple questions. Exam-oriented education comes into being in Taiwan educational system. So, reading and writing are put more emphasis on. In comparison, because speaking is difficult to be examined on paper, people ignore this indispensable language ability little by little.
For Taiwan educational systems, it seems that reading and writing overemphasize. On the contrary, speaking is less noticed of by people in Taiwan. According to the latest rank of TOFEL, people in Taiwan did not get as good grades as those in Asia. Besides, according to the rank of IELTS, the grades of Taiwan are almost worst in different fourteen countries in Asia. These two of tests focus on the whole English proficiency. For Taiwanese students, they only can choose right choices. It is understandable why Taiwanese students do not did a good job on international English exams.
But, when walking along the pavement, you can see many advertisements that many people got high grades in English. Are these people getting very high grades on English really good at English? If so, it seems that there are full of people who proficient in English, even I may say, “Taiwan really becomes an international country.” However, does Taiwan English education lead Taiwan to that way? It is a paradoxical, is not? For my point of view, it is a wake-up call for Taiwan English education.
I do not mean that speaking is surely more important than writing and reading. To be exact, speaking, writing, reading, listening play equal roles, like a man has two hands. One is left, and the other is right. If a man lose one of his hands, his whole body is deficient. Writing and speaking are different forms of communication, both related to language. The former is the mixture of grammar, lexicon, sentence rules, and so on; however, the latter emphasizes manifestation of language. On one hand, writing is more preservable than speaking, so language can last for many years; on the other hand, speaking can express the beauty of language vividly and directly. Therefore, when learning language, you have to train both so that you are able to know language completely.
From now on, we should not ignore the importance of speaking, which is an original form transmitting ideas and messages. Perhaps someone may say that he do not speak English well because he is afraid of speaking wrong English. I think that speaking wrongly is not terrible. That is because everyone has mental language potential. As long as this potential is aroused, everyone can be skilled at every language. As a tutor now, I strive to arouse my student’s language potential. I hope that he will have courage to have his first step to English, especially speaking.