The speech held on 11/26 by department of English

 

Yesterday, I attended the speech held by our department, and the topic of the speech was the career that students from department of English could choose in the future. The lecturer, Sonny, was a professional translator. In this lecture, he not discussed three kinds of careers that most students form department of English would probably choose in the future, including English teaching, working in foreign companies, and translation.

Sonny discussed about the education of English in Taiwan in the speech. He pointed out that people should put more emphasis on writing and speaking than reading and listening. Also, there were too many people who did not view basic skills as important ones, and it was caused by “fast food culture”. People who wanted to improve their English skills should follow the three steps: being correct, being fluent, and being local. When learning, try various ways to learn English and learn to express in English. People could read news, letter, ads, novels, biography and so on to see the different expressions in English. Here, Sonny reminded that we should read as much as possible because the information on the Net was fragment. Many successful people like CEOs spent several thousand dollars on buying books every month to improve themselves. In this section, I think about what is more important when speaking about the order of the importance of the four skills in English. I agree that speaking is a little more important than other three skills because it is the most immediate way to express oneself and communicate with others, but I question if writing is previous than listening and reading. For me, the skills are combined together, and they should not be viewed as totally separated aspects of a language. Also, I think that listening related to speaking, for one person have to response what he/she have heard. But I could still understand why he said that because the English education in Taiwan focuses mostly on reading and listening.

        As students from department of English, my friends and I do care about the issues of future career. Sonny mentions the two main types of jobs of English teaching as career. The first kind is being an English teacher in the education system of Taiwan. The advantage of this kind of teacher is stable and there is less change in the career. On the other hand, one must pass exams and compete with numerous people to seize the few vacancies of teacher in schools. Of course, students could choose the career out of the education system. For example, many people choose to be a cram school teacher, but this is also a highly competitive job because there are over 1,800 registered cram schools, excluding what did not register. Likewise, being a tutor is also competitive, and the income is not very stable when first becoming a tutor.

        In the last part of the speech, I asked a question: What do you think about the accent and how to teach student speak English well? Sonny’s response was that accent is not the most important thing when teaching oral skill of English. On the contrary, making oneself convey his/her ideas clearly is important. He mentioned that vowel and syllable is what the teacher needs to correct the students. Also, many Taiwanese students fear that they do not speak English well, so they speak English fast and vaguely. Ask the students to speak clearly instead of speaking as fast as they could. As a whole, I learned more information about the future career and some techniques that I could apply in the classroom, and it was a meaningful lecture.

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