The Ministry of Education yesterday said it is developing a semiconductor industry-specific Mandarin program to help facilitate international exchanges with Taiwan’s tech sector.
The program, which is being developed by the ministry’s Department of International and Cross-strait Education, aims to bolster the popularity of Chinese-language courses offered by Taiwan while bridging those courses with the nation’s growing tech sector, it said.
The ministry said it hopes the program will be completed by late August to assist foreigners in learning practical Mandarin related to semiconductors.
Photo: CNA
The program content would be available for download from the Taiwan Mandarin Educational Resources Center Web site, it added.
“In recent years, Taiwan has focused on semiconductors as one of the main areas of exchange with higher education institutions in other countries,” department head Chuang Yu-hsuan (莊祐瑄) said. “We wanted to incorporate Mandarin curricula into those exchanges, so we asked the Foundation for Scholarly Exchange at Fulbright Taiwan to help us with that.”
Through the program, Mandarin learning materials would be combined with career development curricula to attract international academics to Taiwan for exchanges, Chuang said.
The foundation would help create situational videos to be used in the curricula, she said, adding that there would be cooperation between industry, government and academia to ensure the videos contain realistic scenarios.
“The ministry has allocated about NT$4.6 million [US$142,636] for the development of program content, which includes teaching materials, drawings, audio files and apps,” Chuang said.
Part of the budget was also used for trial teaching and promotional materials, she added.
The program has 10 units, covering levels A1 and A2 of the Test of Chinese as a Foreign Language, Chuang said.
Topics include the work environment in Taiwan, workplace training, industrial culture and global industry trends, she added.
“The foundation has cooperated with the ministry for years now on professional exchange programs for Americans,” she said. “It is familiar with the needs of cross-field learners and the cultural concerns of foreigners coming to Taiwan.”
The foundation collects and analyzes existing teaching materials and looks at the learning experiences of American learners of Mandarin at home and abroad in its development of materials, Chuang said.
“We work with professionals from Taiwan and the US, as well as Chinese teachers and semiconductor industry experts that the foundation has worked with before,” she said.
“Some of the situational videos would be made with the help of foreign students and instructors from semiconductor programs at Minghsin University of Science and Technology and elsewhere,” she added.
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