Surviving in the System

Using a case-study, ethnographic approach, the
research provides portrayals of four highly motivated
English learners who have managed to learn the
language while they struggle to survive within
Taiwan s highly competitive education system. In
Taiwan, English language learning is subsumed under a
Chinese Imperative (Chen, Warden and Chang, 2005), by
which the masses of students grind through a testing
gauntlet that leaves many students numb and
exhausted. Unlike average students, the
purposively-sampled participants, including two
undergraduates and two graduates, show fortitude and
flexibility as they succeed in conquering the
enormous tasks of learning English. This study
suggests that motivation studies, which tend to place
an emphasis on the western-based dichotomy of
internal and external motivations, result in an
over-simplified model of motivation. These case
studies reveal a complex array of motivations for
mastering English.