Freshmen English: iris

An article from Time By Alex Perry / Cape Town Friday, May. 01, 2009

If the fast spread of swine flu suggests the world is small, the global response to the epidemic reminds us that in many ways it's still light years apart. Swine flu has been making headlines in the Western world, but in places like India and Africa, where "pandemic" is just another part of the daily vocabulary, no one has so much as stifled a sneeze.

In Africa, malaria kills more than 3,000 children a day; in South Africa, HIV/AIDS has taken 2.8 million people and infected 5.3 million more. Every day in India, 1,000 people succumb to tuberculosis. Those are just the big diseases. According to the United Nations, a recent cholera outbreak killed nearly 4,000 Zimbabweans and infected 80,000, while in India diarrheal diseases kill an estimated 600,000 children under 5 every year.

So, when the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that deaths in Mexico from the H1N1 swine flu leapt to 16, you can see why the news didn't make the front page in Africa or India. (The two suspected cases of swine flu in South Africa turned out to be false, and only one case has been confirmed in Asia, in Hong Kong.) Any concern in these regions has so far centered on sports: specifically, whether any new travel restrictions will affect the Confederations Cup, the international eight-team soccer tournament due to be played in South Africa in June, or the Indian Premier League, a new cricket tournament featuring players from around the world, now being played also in South Africa.

Still, the WHO has urged all governments to prepare for an imminent pandemic. "The biggest question is, 'How severe will a pandemic be?'" Dr. Margaret Chan, the WHO director-general, said in Switzerland. So politicians have to make like they're doing something. Gabon and Ghana have banned the import of pork, even though the flu virus cannot be contracted through eating dead pig. Kenya, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe say they are checking arriving passengers at borders and airports and have response plans of varying sophistication should an outbreak occur. In some places, they've gone much further: Authorities in Egypt, which was affected by bird flu last year, have begun slaughtering the country's entire unfortunate pig population of more than 300,000.

But given that many public health systems in Africa do not have the skills, equipment or resources to protect their citizens even against the lethal health crises they battle every day, the truth is that the threat of another disease — even a pandemic flu — tends to elicit shrugs in this sickness-struck continent. If asked what preparations they are making for the possibility of swine flu's arrival, most African governments opt for the same kind of wordy non-statement issued by African Union chairman Jean Ping on Thursday: "We hope to establish a continental plan for prevention, and if necessary a mechanism to fight this outbreak that has not yet affected Africa."

Original link: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1895307,00.html

CHALLENGES: Teachers said a poor learning environment and an ineffective education policy contributed to the sharp rise in the number of students who failed in the exams

By Flora Wang STAFF REPORTER Sunday, Mar 15, 2009, Page 2

Statistics released last month on the results of this year's college entrance examination sent a shock wave through the education community, with the sharp increase in the number of students who scored zero in English composition.The figures, published by the College Entrance Examination Center, showed that the number of examinees who scored zero in the guided writing section hit a five-year high of 22,462, out of a total of 141,858 test-takers. This compares with 16,168 examinees who netted a zero last year.The number of students who scored zero in the English translation section also rose sharply from 15,660 last year to 22,179 this year.The percentage of students who performed poorly in the writing section was closely in line with the findings of Hugo Tseng (曾泰元), a professor of English language and literature at Soochow University who graded about 2,000 of the English compositions in the entrance examination this year.

SPELLING

“There was obviously a decline in students' English writing proficiency ... the most surprising decline was in spelling,” said Tseng, who has worked with the center to grade college entrance examination papers over the past decade. “Spelling is the most basic facet of a language. Without this building block, a person would never be proficient — let alone be able to write a simple sentence.”Very few examinees — less than 10 percent — were able to write a well-structured English composition, Tseng said. “The majority of the compositions [I graded] did not have any structure,” he said.The sharp increase in the number of examinees who failed in the writing section could have been a result of a more complicated and difficult writing topic, as this was the first time examinees were given a static picture instead of a comic strip.Students were required to describe and elaborate on a picture with a person standing in front of a pile of debris — a test Tseng said involved students' cognition ability.“Describing a picture is much more difficult because students have to use logic and analysis, while a comic strip already has a storyline,” said Chen Chao-ming (陳超明), a professor of English at National Chengchi University (NCCU).Although the writing test was admittedly more difficult, it also highlighted several key problems.“Our high school graduates lack analytical skills. They lack training,” Chen said, adding that the examinees were unable to describe the scene because of their limited vocabulary.“They did not know the word 'collapse.' They could not even use the word 'fall' [to describe the debris] even if they had learned this word in junior high school,” Chen said.Even his undergraduate students at NCCU had difficulty reciting the whole alphabet or giving the spelling of the 12 months, he said.The decline in spelling ability could be the result of teachers' excessive emphasis on “input” to students.Teachers spend too much time teaching students materials from textbooks but fail to demand a corresponding “output” from students, Chen said.The decline in students' English writing ability also stands in sharp contrast with the government's increasing emphasis on English learning.Asked what he thought was wrong with the system, Tseng said: “I wonder if our high schools reserve special sessions to teach English writing.”The truth is they are not required to do so. English writing classes are optional rather than mandatory.

GUIDELINES

Current high school curriculum guidelines require schools to reserve four sessions — approximately 200 minutes — per week for English classes, but they do not necessarily have to provide English writing classes.Even if schools would like to offer English writing lessons, school authorities could only do so after the schools' English teaching staff win over teachers of other subjects in a vote for teaching hours at the beginning of every semester.“If we fail to obtain any [elective] teaching hours at the vote, we can't schedule any [writing] classes that semester,” a high school English teacher surnamed Hsieh (謝) said in Taichung.Despite the lack of official writing classes, the curriculum guidelines still set goals for high school students' English writing proficiency.The guidelines state that high school graduates should be able to “correctly distinguish a capital letter from a small letter and use punctuation marks.”Graduates should have the ability to “correctly merge and paraphrase sentences” and make correct sentences by using appropriate phrases or sentence patterns.Students should be able to write a smooth and clear paragraph by the time they finish high school, the guidelines say.But the harsh reality is that with only four English sessions per week, teachers may not have enough time to teach students how to write properly.“I distribute work sheets to freshmen and mention some writing concepts when teaching the materials readings in the textbook. That's all I can do,” Hsieh said.Gary Chi (紀昇助), an English teacher at Taipei's Huajiang Senior High School, said he could only assign students weekly translation practice.“I've found that it would be too much to ask them to write a passage before they could construct a grammatical sentence. And really, they can't write grammatical sentences,” Chi said. Chi said he tried to introduce basic writing concepts to his students, but “writing is almost as difficult as calculus” to the students.Chi said although he wanted to spend extra time helping students polish their writing, he was exhausted after spending every week grading the compositions of his 88 students.Doing so also seriously put him behind his regular teaching schedule, Chi said, acknowledging the difficulty for teachers to help individual student with their writing in a large class.

DOWNSIZE

“What we are doing now is wrong. Classes should be downsized to 15 students, starting from primary school,” he said. Chen also emphasized the importance of teachers changing their methodology from explaining grammar to allowing students to actually use language. “We will never make it if we still teach the English language as an academic subject,” he said.Tseng said learning how to write in English should begin in junior high school with sentence-making and gradually evolve to writing in paragraphs in senior high school.Another problem at the policy level, he said, was that the Ministry of Education should stop measuring every student's writing proficiency with the curriculum guidelines.“This is like measuring the ability of students with different levels of proficiency using the same criterion. This is impractical,” he said. “Everyone has a different problem. There should be an approach catering to everyone's needs.”