In an effort to improve the reading skills of school children in Taiwan, the Ministry of Education is planning to increase the average length of articles in textbooks on the Chinese language. But some teachers are skeptical of its effectiveness.

Elementary school reading lessons are usually comprised of poems or short essays totaling several hundred words.

Perhaps because lessons are so short, Taiwanese students perform extremely poorly on international reading comprehension tests and basically shut down when faced with text containing more than 1,000 characters.

The Ministry of Education is now encouraging textbook publishers to make lessons longer by the 2012 academic year, but a National Teachers' Association member survey shows that most educators believe additional time spent on sentence composition and defining vocabulary would be more effective.

Many also say that unless class times are lengthened, longer lessons will force teachers to rush through classes and have the opposite of the intended effect.

In response, the MOE says that while lessons will be lengthened, the number of pages in textbooks won't change.

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