[ 英文摘要 ]

Children's learning centers in Taiwan have been hiring foreign teachers from English-speaking countries throughout the world to teach English to children for more than 20 years. This educational trend has reached its peak in this recent decade. Currently, there are over 5,000 children's English learning centers across Taiwan; furthermore, nearly 800 of them are established in Taipei. Since over 70% of the children attend English learning centers after school, children are expected to perform better in English, especially in their conversation skills. However, Taiwanese children not only do not seem to benefit from this extra education, but their English performance has even degraded: Taiwanese children ranked 4th in 2002 and dropped to 11th in 2004, according to an Asian ranking (Cambridge Examination Centre 2005). With this kind of failure, people look for a source problem to blame.

Many scholars believe that the problem stems from a tremendous demand for English, which causes a shortage in the supply of teachers and thus poor quality foreign teachers are recruited. The lack of strict government laws and the hasty decision of the learning center owners for higher profits are also major causes for the problem. Although these explanations reveal some important problems within the learning centers, they are insufficient to explain the phenomenon as a whole. First of all, a social problem cannot simply be caused by only one or few things, because the society we live in is far more sophisticated. One social problem is affiliated with another and is therefore produced and entwined in daily life. By focusing on one aspect only, we may neglect other possible explanations or produce factual but biased results.

Thus, this study tries to explain a seemly, but not purely, education problem from a sociological perspective, and provides a causal relationship between all the possible variables including the ones mentioned above, but also parental ideology, language teaching methods and cross cultural aspects. The results of this study show that the parents, as the most influential decision makers of children's English learning; and their beliefs are one of the biggest reason for the learning centers' gain in popularity. As education expands, parents' expectation for the achievement of the next generation increases. When the educational reform in Taiwan came into play in the 1990's and changed the conception of both people and education, parents started to urge for better ways of teaching and higher qualities of education for their children. Since it is now believed that a better way for Taiwanese children to learn English is to immerse them in an ‘All English' environment, the English learning centers taught by foreign teachers became the mainstream. While the introduction of foreign teachers changed Taiwan's social structure, it also caused internal problems within the learning centers and problems between foreign and Chinese teachers. And since it is also believed that children will benefit more from English as Second Language (ESL) teaching methods, they have been broadly used throughout the learning centers. However, the results indicate that the use of immersion and ESL teaching methods are also major reasons for the degradation of Taiwanese children's English ability. It is found that the teaching methods that are suitable and appropriate for one place may not produce the same result in another, because one should never forget to take the different social values, norms, policies, and environmental resources into consideration. In conclusion, the problem is multifaceted and steps should be taken to improve the education of Taiwanese children at many levels.