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The ecological perspective says language teaching should fit its social and cultural context. There is no single best method that teachers should adapt methods to students’ needs and local conditions.

Think about: How do school facilities influence the way you learn English? Do you think early exposure makes a big difference?How does the level of teachers’ training affect your English learning? How do you see English? As a path to various opportunities or only an exam subject? If you were the teacher, what would you do?

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Hu (2005) shows that in less developed areas, English learning is mainly for high-stakes exams. This pushes teachers to focus on grammar and test drills, creating a straitjacket effect that limits real communication in class.

Think about: Have you ever experienced learning English mainly for high-stakes examinations? How did it affect your ability to actually use English?

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The community and educational system use standard American English.

Think about: Which English? What standards? What do we learn English for? Economic purposes? Cultural interest? Reflect on why we as teachers teach English. If you are teaching abroad, how do you think students view you as the "professional" who is teaching them English?

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English isn’t just rules and grammar—it’s about what people actually use it for. Standard American English gets treated like the “official” version, mostly because of business, media, and power, but it’s really just one flavor of English. People pick it up for all sorts of reasons: better jobs, studying abroad, or just vibing with movies and music. As teachers, we’re not only teaching “correct” English but also giving students confidence to use it in real life. If I’m teaching overseas, some might see me as the “expert,” but I’d want them to know there’s no single “perfect” English.

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I personally have not experienced learning English for high-stakes examinations in my own school experiences, but I have experienced it as the teacher. I spent 4 years in a school where I was instructed to only "teach to the test," as our funding depended on it. This resulted in lessons that were not developmentally appropriate for the children, as they were only created with the goal of getting 3s and 4s on the NYSED (New York) English state test towards answering correctly. This absolutely affected my students' abilities and motivations to learn English, as there were few opportunities for intrinsic motivation to develop and real-life scenarios where the learning became relevant.

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Before ninth grade, most of my English learning was tied to preparing for high-stakes exams. I spent a lot of time doing grammar drills and practice tests, which helped with scores but not so much with communication. Once I set my goal of studying abroad, I started paying more attention to how English could be used in daily life—like speaking with classmates, watching shows, or writing casually. That shift made me realize English was more than just an exam subject.

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I believe schools have a great impact on how I learn English. Since my secondary school used British context book 3L "Look, Listen, and Learn" and did a lot of in-class activities, my English is confident and I am always proactive to learn.

Yes. The earlier you're exposed to one language, the quicker and deeper you master it. Best in childhood.

I deem that teachers play an important role in shaping student's attitude in future learning.

I see English as a World language with many varieties. Lingua Franca, in short.

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As someone who was placed in an ESL program in elementary school, I had to take a series of standardized tests to prove that I could keep up with the rest of my class. For me, learning English meant fitting in. My ESL teacher served as a guide to help me integrate into regular classrooms.

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This keyword reminds me of a term called "expected answers". It is a characteristic of language assessments, describing what kind of answers the assessment designers were expecting from students. However, sometimes, we should allow students to give "unexpected answers" as long as they can reflect on what they have learned from the courses.

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Yes, definitely. Like the college entrance exam, College English Test, IELTS, GRE and etc. These kinds of tests indeed help me develop some test skills in time-limited exams like the skill of skimming and skipping read. I have to acknowledge that during the process of preparing for these exams, I learn various words, though, some words are not pragmatic in the reality. I want to practice my oral English in a real world.

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I experienced the high-stakes examinations, because I live in the inland cities and the teachers only focus on explaining vocabularies and grammar- translation. Until I came to university, I barely have had chances to speak something in the classes, which makes my oral English actually pretty bad.

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Hight-Steaks Examinations: my learning experience connects to these approaches, in Saudi Arabia my formal schooling heavily rely on the traditional learning methods like grades and textbooks.

Fatimah

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When I was young, I have experienced a lot of input of English speaking and listening materials, which really helped me to improve my English capacity thoroughly. However, when I grew up and entered to the secondary school, those CLT practices were kind of vanished in my English classrooms because these are not the important part of the standard examination. And that caused my speaking and listening capacity drop rapidly.

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In my high school, I experienced this kind of language teaching. While this builds strong test-taking and grammatical skills, it often weakens practical communication. The result is I may score high but struggles with spontaneous conversation, lacking the fluency and confidence to use English as a living tool for genuine interaction. The language becomes a subject to be tested, not a skill to be used.

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In my IELTS preparation classes, the teacher told us that we only needed to identify keywords in the listening and reading sections without really understanding the passage. Obviously, this did not improve my English proficiency, but it did help me achieve the IELTS score I needed.

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In my opinion, the standard of English is British English. Because the British guided the colonial process. The other English-speaking countries all go after the British. However, the way we speak English has also changed over time, rather than remaining stable.

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Because I studied in a very small city, there was no good teaching environment. None of my English teachers have lived abroad, nor have they even traveled outside China. They only studied the English education major in China. So my spoken English and listening skills are very poor, especially my spoken English. I think my teachers have never corrected my pronunciation, and even their spoken English is very non-standard. They only teach us the ways to deal with exams and how to get high scores. I have always believed that English is my path to various opportunities. First of all, it enables me to go out of China and see the world. If I were a teacher, I would first cultivate students' oral and listening abilities