For English Learner in Taiwan: 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. Last week, I gave an oral training lesson to him. He spoke English very uncertainly and weakly, like a man was telling a lie. 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 why students in Taiwan are afraid of speaking English.
The major reason lies 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.
In comparison, the minor reason consists in the attitude of teachers. That is, if a English learner speaks a little bit wrong English; at that time, English teachers correct his speaking with furious or picky tone successively, something like “How come you say such a bad English?” or “What you say is totally wrong.”, I believe that he will be frustrated with his oral English. From my viewpoint, teachers should correct students’ vital faults in moderation when they are training their speaking, not just finding tiny faults and blaming them how they do not speak well. Furthermore, I think that some encouragements are necessary so that learners are willing to continue their learning. The more urges teachers give, the more progress students will make.
I know that maybe some of English learners in Taiwan will say, “It is not necessarily important to speak English well. That is because as long as I can read signs and books and write sentences, my English is good enough.” However, I think that their thoughts are questionable.
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 languages. 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. According to the book called “Orality and Literacy”, wrote by Walter J.Ong, we can know that these primary oral cultures are actually in the majority and that from historical standpoint writing is a relatively recent development. After hundreds of years, literacy has become a criterion to judge whether one’s literacy and ability of rhetoric are good or not. However, he clearly stated he does not believe that literacy is necessarily "superior" to orality. Therefore, it is clear that oral speaking play an important role in English regardless of the past , the present, and the future.
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.
Although it is hard for us to make a big change on Taiwan English educational system in the short period of time, I still believe that like Dr. Doris Brougham said, “If you are willing to speak ten-minute English, you are accumulating the ability of English.” As a tutor now, I am striving to arouse my student’s language potential. I hope that he will have courage to have his first step to English, especially speaking.

Annotation II

Art Bingham,(1988),Review of Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New Accents. Ed. Terence Hawkes. (New York: Methuen, 1988).
Internet address: http://www.engl.niu.edu/wac/ong_rvw.html
This is a book review about Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy by texts. After reading this book review, we can easily understand that Ong did his best to analyze the relationship between orality and literacy. He devotes the process of language, which means “language history”. He also discusses "literate thought and expression in terms of their emergence from and relation to orality".
The debates of orality and literate have existed so far. Is really literate important than orality? Or is oral culture meaningless? From Ong’s viewpoint, these primary oral cultures are actually in the majority and that from historical standpoint writing is a relatively recent development. After hundreds of years, literacy has become a criterion to judge whether one’s literacy and ability of rhetoric are good or not. In the end of the book, Ong clearly states that he does not believe that literacy is necessarily "superior" to orality.
I think that Ong’s viewpoint is similar to mine. Orality still has its stage to stand in human beings’ history, even though literacy seems to be more essential.

Annotation I

This is a video click about “Orality and Literacy”, which is related to my topic. In this video, you can see a man deliver a speech and express his thoughts about the book called “Orality and Literacy”, which was published by Walter J. Ong. Walter J. Ong, who was a famous writer and analyst, did a research on the field of rhetoric. In this video, he did a direct interpretation of orality and literacy. However, when I browsed through the comments below this video, some of them were for what he says and others were against. It seems that orality and literacy is very controversial.