In a bid to improve Taiwan's chances of assimilating into the international community, Deputy Minister of Education Fan Sun-lu (范巽綠) yesterday said that anyone applying for a job at the government's foreign affairs offices should be able to communicate in English. This echoes a Cabinet order that government workers who can't speak good English six years from now must be punished.
Fan made the remark yesterday in a report to a seminar on the Cabinet's proposed national development plan.
He said that current foreign-affairs office workers must be encouraged to improve their English abilities.
In addition, being proficient in English should be a basic requirement for people who want to work in departments such as Taiwan's diplomatic offices, the Council for Economic Planning and Development and the National Science Council.
"We'll definitely need more staffers who can speak at least two languages in the future because the country is diligently trying to be accepted by the international community," Fan said.
"It is necessary to make it a basic requirement for government jobs, at least. We should start at foreign affairs offices."
Fan also encouraged universities to make English proficiency a graduation requirement.
"If professors speak English in class, it will create an English environment for students and make them feel comfortable to use English more and more," she said.
"The ability to use English well should also be a paramount issue when deciding whether students are qualified to receive their degrees," she added.
The Ministry of Education's (MOE) Public Education Department Second Section Chief Lin Dian-chieh (林殿傑) said on Wednesday that government employees will be administratively punished if they are not able to communicate in English six years from now.
According to Lin, the Cabinet gave a direct order to the MOE to carry out a plan which calls for government staffers who cannot communicate in English within six years to be given an "F" symbol on their annual evaluation forms, which will negatively affect their promotions and salaries.
Minister of Education Huang Jung-tsun (
However, he also said that the plan is not the best way to "encourage" government staffers to improve their English.
"Personally, I thought that we should create an end-goal and encourage everybody to reach that goal instead of forcing people to make it by punishing them," Huang said. "That is not the essence of education."
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS