Exchanges between Taiwan and the US on bilingual education support Washington’s policy of limiting Chinese influence in the US, as well as Taiwan’s goal of becoming a bilingual nation by 2030, American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) Director Brent Christensen said at a Bilingual Education Symposium at Kaohsiung’s National Sun Yat-sen University yesterday.
A US-Taiwan Education Initiative would increase the number of Americans visiting Taiwan to study Mandarin, as well as the number of Taiwanese Mandarin teachers in the US, Christensen said.
The initiative was conceived in a memorandum of understanding signed on Dec. 3 last year between the AIT and the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the US.
Photo: Fang Chih-hsien, Taipei Times
Nearly 300 educators from across Taiwan attended the symposium, which was also attended by Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁) and Minister of Education Pan Wen-chung (潘文忠).
Speaking at the symposium, Pan announced that a bilingual training center would be established at the university as part of the initiative.
The initiative is an important milestone formally marking the beginning of cooperation between the two nations on education issues, he said.
Over the past few months, Taiwanese and US representatives have held several meetings and workshops to discuss educational topics, with bilingual education a major focus, he added.
“English-language skills are an important foundation in efforts to be internationally competitive,” Pan said.
Aside from equipping educators with English-language skills, the bilingual training center would also provide digital resources, including a platform that teachers could access for teaching material, he said.
Christensen touted the Foundation for Scholarly Exchange’s Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Program as an important resource to help achieve the initiative’s goals.
The program, which was implemented in Taiwan by the foundation in 2003, brings teaching assistants from the US to Taiwan to help teach English at the nation’s elementary and junior high schools, he said.
The program is run in 160 nations, but Taiwan has the second-largest implementation worldwide, Pan said, adding that Taiwan is one of the few places in the world where the program is continuing with in-person exchanges amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The moment is ripe for deepening cooperation, especially in teaching and studying Chinese and English. What an excellent example of ‘real friends, real progress,’” Pan said.
A global survey showed that 60 percent of Taiwanese had attained higher education, second only to Canada, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan easily surpassed the global average of 43 percent and ranked ahead of major economies, including Japan, South Korea and the US, data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for 2024 showed. Taiwan has a high literacy rate, data released by the ministry showed. As of the end of last year, Taiwan had 20.617 million people aged 15 or older, accounting for 88.5 percent of the total population, with a literacy rate of 99.4 percent, the data
CCP ‘PAWN’? Beijing could use the KMT chairwoman’s visit to signal to the world that many people in Taiwan support the ‘one China’ principle, an academic said Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday arrived in China for a “peace” mission and potential meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), while a Taiwanese minister detailed the number of Chinese warships currently deployed around the nation. Cheng is visiting at a time of increased Chinese military pressure on Taiwan, as the opposition-dominated Legislative Yuan stalls a government plan for US$40 billion in extra defense spending. Speaking to reporters before going to the airport, Cheng said she was going on a “historic journey for peace,” but added that some people felt uneasy about her trip. “If you truly love Taiwan,
NEW LOW: The council in 2024 based predictions on a pessimistic estimate for the nation’s total fertility rate of 0.84, but last year that rate was 0.69, 17 percent lower An expected National Development Council (NDC) report expects the nation’s population to drop below 12 million by 2065, with the old-age dependency ratio to top 100 percent sooner than 2070, sources said yesterday. The council is slated to release its latest population projections in August, using an ultra-low fertility model, the sources said. The previous report projected that Taiwan’s population would fall to 14.37 million by 2070, but based on a new estimate of the total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime — the population is expected to reach 12 million by
INTENSIFYING THREATS: Beijing’s tactics include massive attacks on the government service network, aircraft and naval vessel incursions and damaging undersea cables China is prepared to interfere in November’s nine-in-one local elections by launching massive attacks on the Taiwanese government’s service network (GSN), a report published by the National Security Bureau showed. The report was submitted to the Legislative Yuan ahead of the bureau’s scheduled briefing at the Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee tomorrow. The national security team has identified about 13,000 suspicious Internet accounts and 860,000 disputed messages, the bureau said of China’s cognitive warfare against Taiwan. The disputed messages focus on major foreign affairs, national defense and economic issues, which were produced using generative artificial intelligence (AI) and distributed through Chinese
RSS