Reading, or vocabulary and grammar?

This evening I had a talk with a practice-teacher-to-be. She told me that usually students expect their English teacher to supply them with a lot of vocabulary words and analyze the text sentence by sentence, focusing on the sentence pattern, instead of discussing the content of a reading text. I told her that students in Taiwan are conditioned by cram school, where they are crammed with lots of new words and phrases.

 

I remember the experience of the girl living next to me. When she was studying in college in the USA, for the first few months, she couldn't accustom herself to the way the American teacher taught reading. She had expected the teacher would do as the English teacher in Taiwan did--analyzing sentences and giving a lot more information about each new word. However, the teacher just discussed the content of the text with the students, asking their opinions about some points in the text. My neighbor even complained to her mother that the teacher was not teaching at all. Hearing her mother talk about her "suffering," I told her mother that was a right way to teach reading.