When students are still trying to improve, I do not think the main idea of the editorial helps solve the problem. It is like telling them, “another reason you cannot learn well is that you are old now and you should have started learning earlier.” Therefore, I am writing to express another view on the subject.

In the beginning of the editorial, it is said that the English proficiency of Taiwanese people is low, especially communicative capabilities. It is obviously true if one looks at the average TOEFL score for Taiwanese students. The poor performance should sadly be persuasive enough for English educators in Taiwan to review and overhaul their teaching methods. In the conclusion passage, however, the idea of moving forward the starting age to learn English from the third grade to the first grade is promoted to solve the problem.

It is generally agreed that the problem is so big that a single solution is not enough and that it really takes time for any solution to get positive result. When the government, educators, parents, and even students themselves are trying hard to improve the English proficiency of the Taiwanese, I do not think it appropriate or even correct to advocate starting learning English at a younger age or since the first grade. The idea is based on the following:

1. Communicative abilities have little to do with how young a learner start to learn a foreign language.

Communicative ability means whether a student can fluently and effectively express themselves. If the listener or the reader understands the speaker and the writer, the communication is effective. Everyone can do it no matter how young he/she starts learning as long as he/she is not too shy to use English. Most Taiwanese students feel embarrassed if they cannot speak “perfectly.” It is more about personality or attitude. It is also problematic to link poor performance in TOEFL to poor communicative skills.

2. In any test, it is always about right or wrong.

To fairly and efficiently evaluate a student’s performance, questions with “correct answers” are preferred when designing a test. Even though a test is designed to evaluate the test taker’s “communicative ability,” such as the speaking test of GEPT, evaluators still need to rate the grammar used in the answer.

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