Premier William Lai (賴清德) has pledged to turn Taiwan into a “bilingual country” by 2030 and on Wednesday last week, Minister of Education Yeh Jiunn-rong (葉俊榮) proposed that some subjects should be taught exclusively in English at all levels.
Meanwhile, many city and county governments have opened or are planning to open bilingual public schools, and bilingual education has become the most popular alternative in experimental education in recent years. From the central government to local governments, bilingual education once again seems to have become a popular national campaign.
Judging from the wave of interest in bilingual education, there seems to be strong agreement on the need to improve the English ability of Taiwanese, in particular the ability to use English to help the nation internationalize.
However, the authorities seem to have rushed through many of the measures — some of them without any afterthought — to produce a solution for its own sake.
Take the Ministry of Education’s push to introduce subjects to be taught in English at elementary, junior and senior-high schools. The purpose of the policy is to help students develop four English skills — listening, speaking, reading and writing — but this is a debatable policy.
The learning environment and learners’ needs are crucial to learning a language. The curriculum and teaching material at local international schools offering courses in English are borrowed from the US or British educational systems, and the students’ goal is to pursue higher education abroad. As a result, such schools must provide a complete, all-English learning environment to meet students’ needs.
However, regular elementary and junior-high school curricula produce their own learning frameworks and academic goals, rather than using those provided by native English-speaking sources, so despite there being no restriction on teaching a subject in English, students might not be equipped to master a subject under such conditions.
When students’ English listening, speaking, reading and writing skills are insufficient, rashly telling them to study other subjects solely in English usually only brings great frustration. They might fail to learn not only English, but also the core subject.
In addition to increasing class hours to boost students’ ability to use English, it is also necessary to overhaul the traditional Taiwanese English course by designing instruction, teaching materials and assessments that take an approach that is closer to the language-learning mode of native English speakers. Of course, teachers also have to enhance their professional abilities. At the very least, a student should master an all-English language course before entering an English-only course in other subjects.
Proposing a policy is easy, but carrying it out is not. Without thorough evaluation and sufficient resources, many policies will simply add to the troubles for those who only have basic English instruction and will be at a loss without sufficient support.
Mike Lee is chairman of the Kang Hsuan Educational Publishing Group.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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