Taiwan can be language learning Internet hub

Statistics show that over 1.3 billion people around the world use Chinese as their main language, and it has been estimated that more than 30 million people in non-Chinese speaking countries are studying Chinese. How should Taiwan respond to the surging global Chinese-language fever? And, faced with China's forceful reaction to the trend, how can Taiwan gain an advantage and sufficient leverage to increase its influence?

The Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission (OCAC) has for five years promoted overseas Chinese education. Apart from insisting on the perpetuation of the traditional Chinese script, the OCAC has for the first time proposed the concept of "diversified culture," and it is hoped that this will lead to an attitude of tolerance among overseas Chinese communities and that it will be easily adapted to a diversity of local environments.

In addition to maintaining traditional teaching materials about Chinese culture, the private sector has also been invited to produce materials, and existing Taiwanese and Hakka language teaching materials have also been used.

Another innovative method has been to emphasize democracy, and to use "Internet democracy" to realize this.

One of the more important of the OCAC's policies over the past five years has been the digitization of teaching materials. This has been manifested both in the form of e-books and direct Internet downloads, including the video/audio book Speak Mandarin in 500 Words in seven different languages. The OCAC has also cooperated with the private sector to publish a set of 10 Chinese-English bilingual comic books in th e-book format called Know the History of Taiwan. Some of these books will soon be placed on the OCAC Web site.

To help overseas teachers prepare their classes, the OCAC has taken the lead in adopting the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) standard developed by the US defense department's Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) initiative, and carefully separated Chinese-language teaching materials, text, audio, image and video files. We have also systematically compiled information on each file type to facilitate searches and use of materials, and to make sharing and reuse easier, as far as possible.

This will lay the foundation for an e-learning curriculum that allows distributed learning, delegation of power and democratic participation to meet different local requirements. This could be seen as a first step for Chinese literary circles, and Academia Sinica member Cheng Chin-chuen (鄭錦全) has lauded it as "the light at the end of the tunnel."

In fact, diversification and democracy constitute the main differences between Taiwan and China. Applying this difference to overseas Chinese education, the OCAC has set up a Global Chinese Language and Culture Center, which is a Web site for Internet-based teaching. It currently has five main categories, 198 topics, and 57 kinds of digital teaching materials. In particular, it emphasizes a Taiwanese appearance, viewpoint and spirit, as well as a Taiwan consciousness. This truly is an entry-level Web site for learning traditional Chinese and Taiwanese culture, and it is also a rich database for teachers of the Chinese language.

In future, we hope to be able to integrate resources to build a "Taiwanese Internet Academy for the Chinese Language" educational platform with registration, on-line learning, diplomas and interactive functions. We want to use this virtual academy to break through the constraints of time and space, and use digital content to implement diversification and democracy, all in order to welcome the 21st Century and the global Chinese-language fever.

Chang Fu-mei is minister of the Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission.

Translated by Perry Svensson