When six-year-old Chiang Tsun-ta (江宗達) stood up to show off his newly learnt Taiwanese to visiting Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday at the Chengder Elementary School's kindergarten, the occasion proved overwhelming.
"Mayor came in as number one in a jogging race," Chiang blurted out -- in Mandarin.
Ma grinned, asking Chiang if he could repeat the sentence in Taiwanese. With hints from his teacher, he finally managed to speak Taiwanese, drawing a roomful of laughter and applause.
"I seldom speak it," the boy confessed later. "But when my teacher began to teach us Taiwanese, I started to learn it," he added.
Chiang is not alone. Since last September, children in Taipei's 416 kindergartens became the first pre-schoolers in Taiwan to be offered Taiwanese courses, as part of an election campaign promise by Ma. Taiwanese originates in the southern Fukienese dialects brought to Taiwan by early settlers, and is now spoken as a first language by about 70 percent of Taiwan's population.
Despite young Chiang's nervous trip-up, as the mayor inspected the kindergarten yesterday to see how his policy was being carried out, he appeared pleased by what he saw.
The point of the program, according to Ma, is not only to give children a fresh, early start in learning the island's different languages, but also to help foster a respect among them for those who speak other languages.
"Teachers can teach kids Taiwanese through children's songs; this will help them learn Taiwan's mother tongue," Ma said in his clearly less-than-fluent Taiwanese. The mayor, who has lived all his life in Taiwan after being born in Hong Kong, started taking Taiwanese language courses three years ago.
"If the next generation can start learning other tongues from childhood, they won't face as many ethnic problems as they grow up," he added.
Such problems alluded to by the mayor have deep roots in Taiwan. Until about 20 years ago, it was against school rules to speak Taiwanese in public, as part of what critics say was the KMT's efforts to suppress the development of an ethnic Taiwanese identity. But the call for a greater awareness of Taiwanese identity in recent years has prompted the official move to include other language courses, including Taiwanese and Hakka, in the educational establishment.
Su Hsiu-hua (蘇秀花), chief of pre-school education at the city government's education bureau, outlined the reasons behind teaching Taiwanese at kindergarten level.
"The key is to teach them colloquial Taiwanese so that they'll know how to cope when faced with situations under different circumstances," Su told dozens of teachers from other kindergartens who were on hand to witness Chengder's Taiwanese teaching activities.
A set of Taiwanese teaching materials, including about 200 newly composed modern Taiwanese children's songs and CDs, will be available by the end of March, Su said.
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