They look like empty classrooms tucked away amid farmland and condos in rural Taiwan. But to the King Car Education Foundation, a Taiwanese nonprofit organization that promotes the study of English, they're a nation.
"We're creating an environment where students must speak English," says King Car official Poly Chang (張孋) as she flips through blueprints of her US$2 million country in a school -- Taiwan's first "English village."
The "nation" -- three floors of rooms attached to a Taoyuan County school -- is still just a vision, but sponsors are lining up to make it a reality. Local airline Eva Air will donate a Boeing fuselage to put on the first floor. Students will disembark from the jet's cross-section, going through "customs," all the while speaking English, Chang says.
A local bank is renovating one classroom in its own image to go with a mock hotel lounge and post office, among other border-town trappings. Instead of attending lectures -- the traditional learning model in Taiwan -- students will cruise the venues, practicing English in real-life scenarios. The instructors, Chang says, will be more like actors on a movie set than classroom teachers.
"We want to use English villages to show Taiwan there are other ways to study English," she says.
Taiwan's "Global Happy English Village," set to open in the fall as English villages in South Korea and Japan do a booming business, reflects what experts say is a global English-learning "fever" -- especially in East Asia, where Taiwan is at the forefront of the movement to learn English. Not even the much-anticipated rise of Mandarin as a foreign language, with its 30 million learners worldwide, comes close to rivaling the spread of English, says Stephen Krashen, a second language acquisition professor at the University of Southern California.
By 2010, two billion people will be studying English and half the world's population -- or 3 billion people -- will speak it, according to English Next, a British Council report published last year.
Nearly 600 million people speak English as a first or foreign language. The popularity of English worldwide, Krashen says, "is growing."
"When Israel talks to Japan, when Korea talks to Brazil, when Germany talks to Ethiopia, it is in English," he adds.
To be sure, Mandarin is surging as a second language; Beijing estimates 100 million people worldwide will be studying it within the decade. Already, Mandarin is the most spoken language on the planet, with most of the country's 1.3 billion people, who comprise 20 percent of the world's population, speaking it.
The Chinese language-learning "boom," Krashen insists, is "at best a mini-boom" in the US, where only 25,000 students, from the elementary to university levels, study it.
"A close look at `Mandarin fever'" there, he says, "shows [it] is exaggerated."
In China, by contrast, more than 100 million people -- a figure equaling roughly one-third of the US population -- have studied English.
"English fever is, to some extent, justified," Krashen says. "English has in fact become the world's second language."
In Taiwan, the "fever" has led to its first English village and a trebling of English students since studying the language became compulsory for elementary students starting in 2001, says James Oladejo, an English professor at National Kaohsiung Normal University.
"Not less than 60 percent" of the nearly 5.3 million students in Taiwanese schools -- some 3 million students -- study English today, compared to roughly 1 million in 2001, Oladejo says.
Taiwan's "national obsession" with English, Krashen says "is typical."
In South Korea, where millions study English from the third grade up, the fever has led to a spike in "frenotomies" -- or surgery to remove the membrane connecting the tongue to the floor of the mouth -- to improve learners' accents.
"The assumption behind this surgery is that there is something about the Korean tongue that prevents Koreans from pronouncing English correctly," Krashen says. "Surgeons performing this operation have not, to my knowledge, been confronted by the obvious fact that thousands of Korean-Americans speak English with no accent."
Across Asia, the fever is fueling big business as private, after-school "cram schools" and other special schools crop up, tutoring students in English. Japan's English "boom" led to the creation last year of 100 "Super English High Schools," where classes are taught totally in English, says Naoki Fujimoto-Adamson, a researcher of English pedagogy at the Tokyo University of Science, Suwa.
The schools and a "wide-ranging" English language-training program for "all" junior and senior high school teachers aim to produce "Japanese who can communicate in general English and also in technological terms," Fujimoto-Adamson says.
As of last year, some 3.6 million high school students there were studying English compared to just 22,161 Chinese-language students at the high-school level, she adds, citing Japan's education ministry statistics.
Perhaps the cram school phenomenon is most evident in Taiwan, where nearly 60 percent of all primary and secondary school students attend English cram schools, according to a poll by the Taiwanese business magazine CommonWealth. The country's registered cram schools total 14,411, but Oladejo claims the real number is much higher.
"For every one registered cram school," he says, "there are two unregistered ones."
Back at Global Happy English Village, electric saws are buzzing and cash is flowing into the future "language-immersion" camp, which will accommodate 200 students daily pending completion in September, Chang says.
China's rise, she adds, is spurring Taiwan to become more competitive on the world stage to compete with its juggernaut rival, and being "global" means knowing English.
"The ongoing increase in English learning results from the attendant demand for improved English skills to remain competitive in the global village," Oladejo says.
That message isn't lost on the Taoyuan County government, which jumped at the chance to lay claim -- along with King Car and its corporate sponsors -- to Taiwan's first English village, anteing up the infrastructure for the project.
"We don't want the camp to be the only one of its kind here," says Taoyuan County Commissioner Chu Li-lin (
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