A total of 550 native English speakers of Chinese descent are to teach English in rural schools across Taiwan for two weeks, the Overseas Community Affairs Council said.
The young volunteers from the US, Canada, the UK and Australia would be sent to 88 elementary and junior-high schools in remote and mountainous areas with a shortage of English teachers, Overseas Community Affairs Council Minister Wu Hsin-hsing (吳新興) said at a welcoming ceremony in Taipei.
The one-month program would also offer the second and third-generation ethnic Chinese a chance to learn more about the homeland of their parents or grandparents, Wu said.
“This is where they grew up and had their roots, which makes Taiwan your roots too,” he told them.
One of the volunteers, 18-year-old Yang Han (楊瀚) from Maryland, said that he is looking forward to teaching children not just English but also about American culture.
Yang, who is assigned to a school in Pingtung County, said that he moved to the US when he was 15 and would be sharing his experience of learning the English language and adapting to American culture.
After undergoing training this week, the volunteers are to teach English for two weeks at elementary and junior-high schools in 16 counties and cities before being taken on tours during the last week, from July 22 to 27.
The annual program was introduced in 2006 by the council, which is in charge of liaising with ethnic Chinese abroad and their communities.
Since the program’s start, about 4,850 overseas volunteers taught English to more than 35,000 students in rural parts of Taiwan, the council said.
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:
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