Very interesting point. The reading/writing education in Taiwan indeed puts too much emphasis on the literary side. However, I am not sure if modifying the reading curriculum can help much. In addition to clarity, a good presenter needs to have a good handle of his/her audience, including knowing how the audience process new information and the amount of new info they can process, without sacrificing the complexity and richness of the main argument. Getting such a handle takes time and exercise in the real world.
As for the relationship between reading/writing education and an individual's ability to deliver a clear presentation, based on my experience, students with quantitative undergraduate majors (engineering, finance etc.) generally do well (not superb, just well) in presenting a story with a clear question-analysis-conclusion structure. However, they tend to fail miserably in explaining why this story is relevant to the audience.
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Posted by El Keridge
at February 9,2009 11:35
You have raised a very good point, but how to solve this problem? It does not matter what kind of article we learn, but how we learn. The process of good research paper should go through reading/writing/critique/presentation. In other words, it includes literature review, analyzing and writing what has been found as well as discussing, self-critique, expert critique, and plain language presentation.
In all of them, the most important part is self-critique. In the learning process, in order to do self-critique, a well-trained instructor should be able to know what went wrong of that article and give hints to the author for self-correction.
Without proper training, it is impossible to ask any students, who have never written any research paper in grammar and secondary schools, to write a readable research paper in post-secondary schools. In order to teach students to write research paper, instructors should know how to write good research paper first. Lack of qualified instructors to teach how to write research paper in grammar and secondary schools is the main problem in Taiwan right now.
It is a skill which should be taught in the early learning age. It is also a long learning process. There is no magic bullet to solve this problem in one day. All in all, it requires building up this skill through basic foundation of education.
There are a lot of tried solutions at the college level that work including writing center, writing core course(s), writing seminars, and integrating writing to academic curriculum design, to name a few.
The complaint about college students' writing incompetency is a pain shared by professors across nations and disciplines. In the United States, there has been a decline of writing competence for year. Professors teaching freshmen blame high schools for not doing a good job, high schools blame middle schools, and the chain of blame goes all the way down to pre-K. Ironically, there is generally a good balance between creativity and argument building in the high school reading/writing curriculum in US. But this balance does not seem to help much. There are a lot of explanations about what went wrong before college. But universities have to ready their students for work or grad school. Something must be done. With some coordinated efforts across departments, students can become a competent professional and/or academic writer in fours years.
I have to admit that I don't really know what is going on in Taiwanese high schools anymore. But I am not convinced that getting K12 schools to emphasize more on argument building can be a more effective solution than developing well coordinated campus-wide writing initiatives in our universities.
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Posted by El Keridge
at February 13,2009 13:42
It is useless to blame whose fault, but it needs to find what went wrong and to propose feasible methods to solve the problems.
Without learning basic writing skill, logic and ability in elementary and secondary schools, it is impossible to ask students to write a good publishable article in post-secondary schools.
In the United States, educators have discovered that writing is one of the biggest problems for college students even in many elite universities. They also discovered that tests can also lead teaching methods of teachers. This is especially true in SAT test. Thus one way to solve this problem is to add one test section to write essay in SAT test, which is composed one-third test scores (800 out of 2,400 possible scores) since 2006. In order to write good essay, students, who plan to attend good colleges, have no choice but reading more books other than textbooks. Yet, at the present time writing in K-12 still does not have dramatically improvement in any reports. However we can predict that writing skill, logic and ability should improve gradually for the generations to come.
Are there any feasible proposed methods to solve writing problem in Taiwan at this time? If not, it is impossible to solve this problem in the near future.
According to "Collapse" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_to_Fail_or_Succeed), it is because the land of China is too flat, nothing to keep them from conquering each others.
