You wish every Taiwanese spoke English like I do.
I was not born an anglophone, yet I am paid to write and speak in English. It is my working language and my primary idiom in private. I am more than bilingual: I think in English; it is my language now.
Can you guess how many native English speakers I had as teachers in my entire life? Zero.
I only lived in an English-speaking country, Australia, in my 30s, and it was because I was already fluent that I was able to live and pursue a career. English became my main language during adulthood in Brussels because it was the lingua franca between people who, for the most part, were not native speakers: I speak English because it is the global language.
My skills at foreign languages in general are nothing extraordinary, as my poor level of Dutch, Mandarin and Lithuanian would demonstrate. If even someone like me, with no natural predisposition to learn languages, could achieve bilingualism in English, then anyone can.
So how did I do it? Well, not with Anglo-Australo-American backpackers calling themselves tutors. Not with cram schools and not with exams. I did it because other non-native speakers made me feel like it was our language.
The obsession with native speakers and the lack of immersive experience, motivation and reappropriation of the language condemns Taiwanese to see the English language as alien to them and, ultimately, fail to learn it. Taiwan’s idolatry of native anglophones also lacks coherence: Only people from what the administration defines as “holding a passport from an anglophone country” can get a work permit, but I lived long enough in Australia to get their citizenship if I wanted to, which means I could fulfill the criteria without being a native speaker.
I have no intention of becoming a teacher (or an Australian), but it does not matter. Taiwan is infested with parodies of English tutors who leech off rich Taiwanese parents desperate to give their children language skills (or at least appear to), despite their total lack of training in education. This is not a language-learning policy, it is a token effort.
This is not to say that native anglophones cannot be educators if trained accordingly, but they are not the best teachers by default. They can sound intimidating, and children subjected to a perfect accent get the idea that the language is hard to pronounce, giving them the impression that fluency is out of reach. Narrowing educators to native speakers limits the scope of the language to the anglosphere when the whole point of speaking English is to be global.
We do not expect any Taiwanese to be the next Bronte sibling or a Shakespearian actor, we just want them all to be comfortable enough to speak to the world. Unless you have reached a level of fluency where your next step is to train your accent, you do not need a native speaker; you need someone who makes you feel like this language is your own.
It also matters domestically. Taiwan cannot limit itself to the very few foreign talents who acquired Mandarin — by definition, every effort they dedicated to learning such a complicated language was not spent growing a skill that Taiwan needs. In Brussels, we hired foreign talent and spoke English in the workplace — they often ended up learning a national language because they wanted to stay and make their daily interactions easier, but they did not need it at work.
In Lithuania, where the national language is spoken by barely 3 million people worldwide, they understood that waiting for foreigners to memorize their gazillion declensions would forever block them from attracting the right people, so they went as far as accepting legal documents in English.
Taiwan cannot sit and wait for others to learn Mandarin, or it would be limited to the worst kind of expats whose only skill is to speak less Mandarin than a local. Most businesses would benefit greatly by making English their working language and not requiring Mandarin fluency.
The English language does not belong to its native speakers anymore. The price that native anglophones have to pay for the comfort of already speaking the world’s language is that it has been taken off their hands and is now under the control of a global community of which they are only a small part. Taiwan could adopt this mindset, use its own teachers and see English as a tool to speak to the world, free from academic constraints or the pressure of conforming to Anglo-American ways.
It is by being made conscious of the value of a global language and being invited to make it my own that I achieved fluency in English. If Taiwan could open its eyes to how immensely useful it is, and if Taiwan reappropriates the English language, its population would become proficient in English.
Julien Oeuillet is an independent journalist in Kaohsiung. He produces programs for Radio Taiwan International and TaiwanPlus, and writes for several English-language publications globally.
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