Media headlines such as “English departments in decline: need for extra vocational English education” (United Daily News, Sept. 28) have highlighted the struggles of the English-language education industry in recent years. The issues, excluding top-tier universities’ reputable and well-run departments, have generally stemmed from failed education reforms and the erratic language policies of successive governments over the past 20 years. These have led to a decline in enrollment in English programs nationwide and consequently attrition in the English-language skills of Taiwanese.
A case in point is the removal of English as a subject, along with Chinese and Mathematics (B), from the College Entrance Examination, starkly at odds with the core emphases of secondary educational trends across the world. The removal of English from the important assessment of academic aptitude and workforce suitability has misled the public into believing that English-language skills are no longer valued and that English programs at colleges and universities are of limited utility.
While it is necessary for English departments nationwide to diversify their offerings and tilt toward more pragmatic trends in step with advances in technology, reorientation in the humanities and a rapidly transforming world, it is equally important for governments to have the policy vision to usher in a new reality and not lead the public down misguided paths.
Brown University professor of English and author Robert Scholes writes in The Rise and Fall of English that English departments today are going the way of Greek and Latin in the early 20th century, when entrance requirements for classical languages were eased at Yale in 1907. In just eight years, the percentage of freshmen with prior knowledge of Greek fell from 98 percent to 50 percent, and the percentage of students enrolled in Greek classes dropped from 60 to 29 percent.
“What this society does not want from our educational institutions is a group of people imbued with critical skills and values that are frankly antagonistic to those that prevail in our marketplaces, courts and legislative bodies,” Scholes writes.
He recommends that English faculties “rethink their enterprise as a discipline” and “replace a canon of texts with a canon of methods,” presented to students “in the form of intellectual tools that they can use effectively.”
English programs at Taiwan’s universities would do well to follow Scholes’ recommendation to “accommodate the rise of new media and situate traditional literary works among the texts of these upstart media.”
In both assessment and curricular design, the discipline needs to embrace technological innovation and electronic media; instructors might need to undergo professional development so as to enable necessary reforms. Students should be encouraged not only to acquire the five basic skills of speaking, listening, reading, writing and translation, but also to minor in practical fields to enhance their employment prospects.
As local tech giants like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co seek to hire more graduates from humanities, language departments would do well to redesign their curricula to better position their graduates to compete in this new economy.
According to Statista, English and Mandarin Chinese remain the most sought after and most popular languages for international communication. To stay relevant in this changing world, English departments must understand their role in the global marketplace and revamp workforce and course design to deliver a more diverse, more practical and more up-to-date curriculum.
Li Chen-ching is the coordinator of the Bilingual Translation Review Committee at the National Academy for Educational Research.
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