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...