| Summary: | 碩士 === 玄奘大學 === 應用外語系碩士班 === 98 === The purpose of this study is to investigate the perceptions of the TOEIC and its impact on the school’s policies, teachers’ teaching, and students’ English learning in a private university in northern Taiwan.
To collect necessary data for the study, the researcher has implemented both qualitative and quantitative methods. Interviews are made to the chairperson, three teachers, and 8 students of the Department of Applied Foreign Languages of this university. A questionnaire is administered to the freshmen and sophomores of the Department. Besides, formal records, meeting minutes and official documents concerning about TOEIC are also assembled for analysis. The study lasts for around a year. Results are categorized, transcribed, calculated, analyzed, discussed and described in statistic figures.
The major findings show that TOEIC’s impact is enormous and decisive. First it affects the school authorities to make the policy of adopting a TOEIC 650 score as a threshold for the English majors in the Department of Applied Foreign Languages. The enactment of the TOEIC 650 policy brings about a series of measures and actions which in turn have directly or indirectly affected the teaching and learning in the Department. To help students pass the TOEIC threshold, the Department, under the project of Excellence in Teaching, has offered TOEIC intensive and preparation courses, TOEIC lectures, TOEIC group registration, and TOEIC vocabulary competitions. Besides, appealing monetary rewards have been for students who have made progress in TOEIC scores and those who score high in testing competitions. Second, TOEIC washback on teaching at the Department ranges widely from a high degree of impact to no impact at all, depending chiefly on whether the course is directly related to TOEIC. One teacher has even created a TOEIC vocabulary learning system and put it up online for the students to use free. Finally, TOEIC has also generated different degrees of washback on individual students’ learning in the Department. It has little or no impact on some students, but motivated a few others to study English for at least a period of two or three months. Some of the students do not seem to have been affected at all by TOEIC and the related TOEIC activities held by the Department. In contrast, there have been some students who are really well motivated and want to score high in the TOEIC. They have attended the preparation courses, the lectures, testing competitions, etc. It is also found that quite a high percentage of the students want to take TOEIC in their college years because it is a threshold and they believe that a certified high TOEIC score is helpful to their job seeking and further advanced studies after graduation.
Pedagogical implications and suggestions derived from the findings are presented to the policy makers, teachers and students of this school on the one hand, and to educational administrators, teachers and educators in Taiwan on the other hand.
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