Posted: Oct 10, 2015 6:53 am
quas wrote:Rote learning is an Asian tradition.
It's actually a universal tradition, with some nations further removed.
quas wrote:In many countries around S.E.A. region (Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, etc), in the better schools, the English teachers have moved away from the rote-learning method of teaching, whereas lots of Chinese teachers teaching in the same school still use this enhanced-teaching technique.
I would say this slightly differently: many of the better schools say that their teachers don't use this method, but many teachers still do. Even in Europe, I've seen this - in Italian universities, you are often expected to mimic your professors' arguments, not produce something novel.
Rote learning is good for one thing: learning tables of data, such as times tables, or irregular verbs in French or Latin, but not so much for more complex parts of speech.