National Taiwan Normal University yesterday unveiled the result of this year's Aboriginal culture and language proficiency examination, with test-takers who lived in Aboriginal communities outshining other examinees.
A total of 6,950 Aboriginal students registered for the examination, but only 5,308 participated in the accreditation examination.
Up to 61.8 percent of the examinees passed the test, with those who lived with their grandparents or lived in an Aboriginal community performing better than those who lived in a non-Aboriginal community, Chen Hsueh-chih (陳學志), associate dean of the university's School of Continuing Education, told a press conference.
Examinees who obtained better scores either learned their mother tongue from childhood or had actively participated in the Aboriginal language classes offered in school or churches in Aboriginal communities, Chen said.
Female students generally performed better than their male counterparts, school CEO Huang Hung-cheng (黃鴻程) said.
The majority of examinees who passed the test were native speakers of Amis, with 1,166 people out of the 1,992 Amis test-takers receiving accreditation, school data showed.
Native speakers of Paiwan and Atayal who passed the examination came in second and third respectively, data showed.
Examinees who were native speakers of Saisiyat and Thao scored lower than speakers of other Aboriginal languages, the statistics showed.
“This means we may have to invest more resources to revive these two languages,” Huang said.
Vice Minister of the Council of Indigenous Peoples Mayaw Dongi, who was at the press conference, emphasized the need to encourage speakers of Aboriginal languages to use their mother tongue.
“There are about 5,600 languages in the world, but linguists predict that only 100 would survive a millennium later,” he said.
“Linguists also believe that a language will die if no more than 75 percent of its speakers actually speak the language,” he said, adding that losing the nation's Aboriginal languages would be a “huge loss” to humankind and Taiwan.
Mayaw said many people had criticized the accreditation examination system because students who passed it are granted bonus points when they take the high school or college entrance examinations.
“But granting preferential treatment to Aborigines is necessary because there is a substantial difference between the living environment of Aborigines and people of other ethnic groups,” Mayaw said.
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