The country's efforts to compete with China in the market of international Chinese language instruction by certifying elite teachers are set to expand overseas, as the global proliferation of "Confucian Institutes" and China's standards of Mandarin instruction boost China's "soft power" and threaten to further marginalize Taiwan, a senior education official said yesterday.
A Chinese pedagogy test unveiled by the Ministry of Education last November will be administered overseas for the first time this summer to aspiring Chinese language instructors in Vietnam and Thailand, said Chang Chin-sheng (張欽勝), director of the education ministry's Bureau of International Cultural and Educational Relations.
"China's influence in the global Chinese-language instruction market is, of course, tremendous," Chang said. "But Taiwan still has a chance to fill a niche in the market by providing elite instruction, and increase the international community's understanding of Taiwan by doing so."
The Chinese government has founded Confucius Institutes -- internationally based schools that provide foreigners with affordable, private Chinese-language instruction.
A growing number of US academics accuse the schools of being international nodes of ideology and influence for the Chinese Communist Party.
Chang said his ministry seeks to introduce the test -- which Chang said are infused with Taiwanese culture and worldviews -- abroad, beginning with Thailand and Vietnam, where the demand for Chinese pedagogical certification is high, he said.
"China has its system of Chinese instructor certification, and now he have ours," Chang said, adding that the test helps to ensure that Taiwanese government-certified instructors -- or teachers who have passed the test -- are "high-caliber" Chinese-language teachers.
"Our standards are higher [than China's]; the quality of instruction is higher," he added.
Only 71 testers of more than 2,000 examinees passed all five sections of the test last November to become fully certified Chinese-language instructors in the eyes of the Taiwanese government, Chang said.
Indeed, being certified according to exacting and official standards, he added, could mean the difference between a teacher landing or losing out on a coveted teaching position.
"We won't guess how many people will take, or pass, the test in Vietnam and Thailand because it's a very difficult examination," Chang told the Taipei Times.
For Ann Chen (陳立元) -- a seasoned Chinese-language instructor and a consultant to Chang's bureau, which designed the test -- the test's difficulty is necessary to ensure that certified teachers are elite.
"We told the ministry that it must be difficult. There's this misperception out there that any native Chinese speaker can sign up for this test, pass it, get certified and scope out lucrative teaching jobs in the US, and that's just not the case. This test is a filter to sift out elite professionals," Chen said.
A Chinese pedagogy specialist, Chen said Taiwan's churning out crack Mandarin teachers would help it to foster closer ties with the international community, while allowing the country to capitalize on the global craze for Chinese instruction.
"It's more effective than more official means of diplomacy," she said, referring to the deepening of cultural understanding between nations that foreign language instruction brings about.
The test will be held on July 28 and 29 in select locations across Taiwan, and in Thailand and Vietnam, according to a ministry statement.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater