The government’s plan to make English the nation’s second official language would be a waste of resources and of little help in improving the nation’s competitiveness, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Ko Chih-en (柯志恩) said yesterday.
“If the government wants to improve people’s English proficiency, it should establish a committee to promote English proficiency instead of a committee to promote English as an official language. They are two entirely different things,” she said during a question-and-answer session at the Legislative Yuan in Taipei.
The Executive Yuan in October last year instructed the Ministry of Education to establish a Committee to Promote English as an Official Language to research English education policies and draft a plan on how to achieve the goal.
It said in August that it would present policy goals next year for making Taiwan a “bilingual nation” that speaks Chinese as well as English.
Asked how the Executive Yuan plans to promote the policy, Premier William Lai (賴清德) said the first goal was to make Taiwan “a bilingual nation, where the government would use both English and Chinese.”
English could be promoted as a second official language once the first goal has been met, he said.
Promoting English as a second official language might be “the wrong thing to focus on,” as that has nothing to do with global competitiveness, Ko said.
Of the 76 nations that have designated English as their official language, most were former colonies of Britain, she said.
“Japan, South Korea, Luxembourg, Iceland do not have English as an official language, but they have a higher GDP than Taiwan. Belize, Zimbabwe and Uganda are officially English-speaking countries, but are they more competitive than us?” she said.
Recklessly implementing the policy could lead to great waste of educational and governmental resources, she said.
“English might not radically change things for the better, but it definitely helps,” Lai said.
Ko also criticized the Executive Yuan’s plan to relax the regulations on foreign teachers in the face of a need for more English teachers for the bilingual policy plan.
According to a National Development Council bill on economic immigration, foreigners with a college degree would be eligible to teach English and other subjects at elementary, junior-high and senior-high schools as well as universities, while Taiwanese would still have to meet many qualifications — including taking teaching courses, completing an internship, obtaining teaching certificates and passing tests — to qualify as teachers, the lawmaker said.
Was it really necessary to lower the threshold for foreign teachers, Ko asked the premier.
The bill has yet to be approved by the Executive Yuan and the government would implement supplementary measures for foreign teachers when it is, Lai said, adding that most teachers would still be Taiwanese.
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