Impacts of the Test of English Listening Comprehension on students' English learning expectations in Taiwan

Abstract

In Taiwan, English language learning in senior high school has predominantly focused on reading, with a heavy emphasis on memorising vocabulary and grammar rules. English listening has been marginalised and is not officially taught until the first year of university. In 2012, the Joint Board of College Recruitment Commission in Taiwan passed legislation that made the new Test of English Listening Comprehension (TELC) a requirement for university application and a part of the College Entrance Examination for senior high school students. The implementation of this new English listening test policy is likely to have unpredictable impacts on its major stakeholders, particularly the students. The present study explored the extent to which the TELC affected Taiwanese senior high school students’ language learning and their expectations about the teaching of listening in English classes. The findings revealed that the TELC had a general influence on the participants overall and that certain components of the TELC resulted in more significant differences in students’ perceived English listening proficiency than did their subject specialisation. These results suggest that the introduction of this new listening test might serve as leverage for change in the English language teaching in Taiwanese secondary schools in the future.

Keywords:

• test impact
• Test of English Listening Comprehension
• listening
• senior high school
• teaching approach

Acknowledgements

My appreciation goes to Professor Ching-hwa Tsai at Wenzao Ursuline University of Languages for his assistance in data collection from the seven senior high schools. I am grateful to Dr Graham Low at the University of York for his suggestions. Finally, I would like to thank all the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07908318.2015.1027216.

Notes

1 Senior high schools include students aged from 16 to 18 years, and junior high school students are aged from 13 to 15 years.

2 The reason for asking the participants to identify their ‘self-perceived English abilities’ rather than their TELC results was because the test results were unavailable at the time of data collection. Due to the tight English course schedule at the senior high schools and the anonymity of the questionnaire survey, the researcher was only allowed to collect data during a given limited time frame and was unable to match the questionnaire with the participants’ test results. However, an official report on the TELC scores in October 2013 (CEEC, 2014a) showed that of 26,258 senior high school test-takers in southern Taiwan, 14.84% of them received level A, 44.60% reached level B, 37.71% reached level C, and 2.85% failed the test. For the present study, I later confirmed via the school authorities that the majority of the participants received the test results at level B, while a minority were at level A and only a small proportion of them were at level C.