Recently, about a dozen news organizations around the world covered Education First’s English Proficiency Index results, which ranked 44 nations according to their scores from the company’s online tests. The results were surprising: Not only did English-savvy India rank next to China in the bottom third, but Taiwan was deemed “low proficiency,” while Japan attained “moderate proficiency.” In an era of increasing globalization, these results raise issues over how, and why, Taiwan should improve its level of English.
With regard to its rankings, the company admits to violating several statistical principles that would make its results more representative. We recognize that the test-taking population represented in this index is self-selected and not guaranteed to be representative of the country as a whole. Only those people either wanting to learn English or curious about their English skills will participate. These biases would tend to return scores higher than for the general population.
In terms of Taiwan, the report generalizes that “English is not very present in everyday life in Taiwan although people are familiar with American culture through TV and movies.”
As expatriates who have lived in both countries would rush to point out, bilingual signage and services are much more prevalent in Taiwan than in Japan. In addition, Taiwanese hospitals can generally handle English, whereas Japanese hospital staff have little comparable ability.
The survey does mention the elephant in the room: public education’s failure to provide effective English instruction in both Taiwan and Japan.
Actually, most English instruction is delivered in private “cram schools” called bushibans (juku in Japan), which the report points out by saying: “It is common for families with financial resources to send their children to private tutorial centers.”
Instead of holding school systems accountable for insufficient instruction, the report blames “a lack of qualified English teachers [that] forces schools to restrict the number of hours of English courses.” As a result, too many Taiwanese and Japanese students stay in classrooms until 9pm and parents must pay (if they can) for the lessons that their children should be getting during the day.
This public neglect of English has repercussions for Taiwan after students graduate. Leaving aside the laughable international comparisons, the nagging truth is that Taiwan’s institutional English is poor, despite being presumably crafted and managed by professionals.
This tolerance of mediocrity or worse is difficult to understand because if the government seeks to attract tourists, to offer medical services to international visitors or to expand international education, it should aspire to provide a basic standard of English communication.
Because of agencies and universities’ decentralized public information and publishing activities, most institutional English documents and Web pages are not reviewed by a native English speaker. Even professional editors tend only to correct errors, as they are not encouraged to review a texts’ basic content. Officials’ lack of interest in English content leads to the re-use of out-of-date messages and often to slapdash texts written by whoever in the office has the best English.
The answer to this is simple: Every internationalizing institution needs English quality control at the institutional level with a feedback loop and accountability for errors. No document should be released without being edited by a native English speaker; ideally this standard applies to English correspondence as well.
Because of uneven or absent administrative scrutiny, most errors pass unnoticed and uncorrected. This lack of feedback fails to assign accountability — so “Chinglish” thrives.
Following much rhetoric, money and effort on internationalization, Taiwan’s institutions must actually take the big step of involving native English speakers in research and writing. Much money is spent on expensively printed publications that impress English readers only with their errors. If agencies and educators cannot provide even mediocre English published material, how can they be trusted to conduct diplomacy or educate in English?
Taiwan’s institutions must review whether to continue their international outreach via unimpressive translations of convenient Chinese-language content or whether globalizing requires facing new languages, cultures and ways of thinking with multicultural staff.
Internationalization is not a coat of English paint over a local structure — it is a bridge that requires strength at both ends. A good beginning would be a gathering of current native English-speaking staff “embedded” in education and government, so that ideas can be traded and networking effectively leveraged.
Official funding is also needed to support consistent use of English quality control staff. If Taiwan wants to globalize, it must ensure good English is the rule not the exception in official and educational media.
Val Crawford is global outreach adviser at Taipei Medical University. Peter Chang is dean of Taipei Medical University’s International Office.
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