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
A series of strong earthquakes in Hualien County not only caused severe damage in Taiwan, but also revealed that China’s power has permeated everywhere. A Taiwanese woman posted on the Internet that she found clips of the earthquake — which were recorded by the security camera in her home — on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu. It is spine-chilling that the problem might be because the security camera was manufactured in China. China has widely collected information, infringed upon public privacy and raised information security threats through various social media platforms, as well as telecommunication and security equipment. Several former TikTok employees revealed
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
At the same time as more than 30 military aircraft were detected near Taiwan — one of the highest daily incursions this year — with some flying as close as 37 nautical miles (69kms) from the northern city of Keelung, China announced a limited and selected relaxation of restrictions on Taiwanese agricultural exports and tourism, upon receiving a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) delegation led by KMT legislative caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅崑萁). This demonstrates the two-faced gimmick of China’s “united front” strategy. Despite the strongest earthquake to hit the nation in 25 years striking Hualien on April 3, which caused
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past