Seven individuals and three organizations yesterday received the Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Promotion of Native Languages for their work to promote Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese), Hakka and Aboriginal languages.
Liao Wen-ho (廖文和), founder of the Liao Wen-ho Puppet Theater (廖文和布袋戲團) and Cheng An-chu (鄭安住), a retired junior-high school teacher, accepted their awards at a ceremony in Taipei for their efforts to promote Hoklo.
Hsu Jui-sheng (徐瑞聲), a lecturer at Hakka community colleges; Liao Wei-cheng (廖偉成), an elementary school teacher at Yunlin County’s Dong Sing Elementary School; and Chung Shu-ying (鍾淑英), a teacher at Kaohsiung Municipal Meinung Junior High School, were awarded for their contributions to teaching Hakka.
Pinuyumayan School principal Lin Ching-mei (林清美), a Bunun Aborigine, and Taoyuan Baling Elementary School teacher Chen Sung-ming (陳松明) were given the award for their work to pass on Aboriginal languages.
Lin, 80, said that her greatest hope was to salvage the “endangered” Bunun language.
“When learning a language, fast progress cannot be achieved in a classroom, but rather through personal experiences,” she said.
To promote the Bunun language, Lin said she has often encouraged Bunun youngsters to attend the millet harvest and hunting festivals in their villages, where they are able to speak their mother tongue with elders.
She is also a member of a Ministry of Education committee for the creation of curricula on indigenous languages, which last week celebrated the 10th anniversary of the romanization of Aboriginal languages.
“I hope that I can continue my endeavors in this field for another 10 years,” Lin said.
Hsu said he started his teaching career by making random telephone calls to homes in Hakka communities in Miaoli County to discuss the tones of Hakka with interested people.
In 1998, he began distributing flyers to promote free Hakka lessons in what was then Taipei County, where he worked, and opened his first Hakka class in a classroom he rented at Xiu Lang Elementary School.
As his reputation grew, he was invited by several community colleges to serve as a Hakka lecturer, he said.
However, as subsidies granted by the Hakka Affairs Council shrunk, many of the classes were terminated, he said.
Hsu said that he has visited Panama, Costa Rica and Mauritus, where Hakka constitute a sizable portion of their demographics, to teach young overseas Taiwanese Hakka.
He still works as a lecturer at Taipei’s Hakka Cultural Park near Shida Night Market and at a community college near Longshan Temple in Wanhua District (萬華).
Cheng, who has taught Hoklo nationwide for more than 20 years as part of several ministry projects, said that he has given away a considerable number of CDs he made to his students.
He created music videos of popular Hoklo pop singers, such as Jody Chiang (江蕙), with Hoklo subtitles transcribed from the Mandarin lyrics in a bid to pique students’ interest, he said.
He also participated in a project to dub Western cartoons that the ministry had selected as teaching materials for Hoklo education at the elementary-school level.
During a month-long teaching tour to seven overseas cities, including Vancouver, New York and Los Angeles, he showed Japanese anime dubbed in Hoklo to overseas Taiwanese, Cheng said.
“Interest is your best teacher,” Cheng said. “It is not what I want to teach, but what the children want to learn, that matters.”
Kinmen County Jinding Elementary School and Changhua County Chang Hsing Junior High School received the award in recognition of their work in Hoklo education, while Formosa Hakka Radio Station was awarded for its programs and activities promoting the Hakka language.
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