Language education a start
New curriculum guidelines for elementary and junior-high schools will come into force next month. As part of the guidelines, teaching materials in seven Southeast Asian languages will be provided to students nationwide and in elementary schools there will be a mandatory one class per week in a Southeast Asian language.
Taiwan will be the first nation in the world to incorporate multiple Southeast Asian languages into its official curriculum.
According to statistics, there are 300,000 children of first-generation immigrants living in Taiwan, the majority of whom are in elementary and junior-high schools. This is a new force in Taiwanese society that cannot be ignored.
The inclusion of mandatory lessons in Southeast Asian languages at elementary level shows that the government is placing increasing importance on the second-generation immigrant demographic, and enriching cultural diversity.
Studying one’s mother tongue is clearly a good thing in itself, but achieving mastery in a second language would also give these children a competitive edge later on in life.
Furthermore, if they return with their mother to visit her family, they would be able to converse with their maternal grandparents and other family members.
However, for children that are not from immigrant families, it is unlikely that they will be keen on studying Vietnamese or Burmese and most parents will surely prefer their children focus on English.
I have also heard of immigrant spouses being criticized by their in-laws for teaching their children their mother tongue.
Further, many parents and students believe that obtaining superficial knowledge of a Southeast Asian language is essentially a waste of time.
These kinds of attitudes exist because Taiwanese society is largely still prejudiced toward new immigrants.
If Taiwanese children imbibe a negativity toward Southeast Asian countries from their family members as well as wider society — yet at the same time are forced to take a Southeast Asian language class at school — this will simply increase the burden on immigrant children and lead to their further exclusion from peer groups and wider society.
Additionally, finding qualified teachers of Southeast Asian languages will also likely be a problem. If there is a shortage, this will inevitably lead to the bar for entry being reduced and unqualified people filling teaching positions. It will clearly be harder to fill positions outside of the big cities and this will only widen the education gap between rural and urban areas.
More work needs to be done by the government to develop a full package of measures that will compliment the new curriculum guidelines that introduce mandatory classes in Southeast Asian languages.
Finding ways to reduce prejudice toward Southeast Asian countries within society will be equally important, otherwise parents and students will never identify with or be willing to study the languages and cultures of their close neighbors.
Lee Yueh-chih
Taipei
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