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I've taught English in Taiwan for twenty-five years, in classrooms that ranged from cram schools to university lecture halls. This isn't an outsider's critique. I've stood in front of the whiteboard and run the drills myself.

Here's the pattern I keep watching repeat. A student starts English lessons at seven. She stays in the system through senior high school. By eighteen she's logged thousands of hours of class time; her parents have spent a real share of their income on vocabulary lists, grammar drills, and mock exams. She sits the exam. She gets the certificate. But she still can't hold a five-minute conversation with a stranger.

That's not a rare case. I've watched it happen for two and a half decades, and it happens for a specific reason: the system isn't teaching English. It's teaching test scores. GEPT, IELTS, TOEFL — get the number, get the certificate, move to the next stage. Therefore nobody in the room ever asks whether the student can use the language once the exam is over.

I want to be precise about where the fault lies, because it isn't with the students. Taiwanese students work hard. The discipline is real; the hours are real; the repetition is real. A student can drill passive-voice transformations for a decade and still be unable to explain what she did last weekend — and that isn't laziness. Those are two different skills, and Taiwan's system has only ever tested one of them.

So here's what I'd say to anyone studying English in Taiwan, or in any system built the same way: stop treating the band score as the finish line. Ask a harder question instead. Can you explain an idea clearly to someone who disagrees with you? Can you negotiate a deadline? Can you argue a position and hold it when someone pushes back? That's English. A certificate is a receipt for having sat an exam — it was never proof that you can use the language.

I made a version of this argument about Japan's English education system recently, and the response told me something worth saying out loud: this isn't a Japan problem, and it isn't a Taiwan problem. It's what happens in any country that builds a decade of English instruction around a single number.

I teach IELTS, TOEFL, and GEPT preparation for a living, so I'm not arguing the exams should disappear. I'm arguing they're in the wrong place. The score should be a byproduct of real ability, not the target the whole curriculum points at from age seven onward. Fix that order, and the certificate stops being a receipt. It becomes a fact.

[Placeholder body copy.] This paragraph stands in for Werner's real draft. Replace it with the actual article — recommended length 600–900 words, B2–C1 register, written in the classroom voice already established on the About page.

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