An Overview of English Language Education at Primary Level in Taiwan

English is the major foreign language taught at schools in Taiwan (Crawford, 2003; Su, 2000). It is also the most commonly studied foreign language and the language used for wider communication in business and scholarly exchange. It had been traditionally taught beginning at Year 7 until 2001 when the Nine-year Integrated Curriculum was implemented and English was introduced to the Grade 5 curriculum (Chang, 2007; Chern, 2002). English was later lowered to Grade 3 curriculum in 2005. To accommodate this change, many policies were stipulated and implemented in the first decade of the 21 century. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview and discuss some pertinent issues of English language teaching (ELT) in elementary schools in Taiwan.