For foreign teachers looking for work in Taiwan, things are looking up following Thursday's revisions to the Employment Services Law.
Under the revisions, bilingual departments of experimental high schools and bilingual schools, both public and private, are now allowed to hire foreign teachers.
In addition, private elementary schools and junior high schools are now allowed to hire foreign instructors to teach foreign language classes.
Prior to the revisions, only colleges, schools for expatriates and cram schools were allowed to hire foreign teachers.
KMT legislator Daniel Han (
"Many foreign teachers felt angry and deceived to find out that their employers had become a `cram school,' when they had expected to teach in a high school," Han said.
Han said a private junior high school in central Taiwan was sued by a foreign teacher over such an incident.
"The law was simply outdated," Han said. In addition, he said, the changes were badly needed because bilingual teaching is expected to become a trend across the nation.
The Hsin Sheng Elementary School in Taipei, which is set to start recruiting students this year, has been designated as a bilingual school, becoming the first of its kind in the country.
The revisions have also resolved problems faced by the National Experimental High School at the Science-based Industrial Park in Hsinchu.
The school, set up in 1983, is currently the only experimental school in the country. It has a bilingual department in which all subjects are taught in English with the exception of the subject of Chinese. But the school's needs -- to hire foreign teachers -- were not taken into consideration when the Employment Services Law was adopted in 1992 to control the employment of foreigners nationwide.
The school currently has 18 foreign teachers and around 400 students in its bilingual department.
School principal Tai Li-ming (
"Many of our foreign teachers felt insulted because there wasn't a rule in the law books that was applicable to them," Tai said.
In the process of making the revisions, some lawmakers had originally intended to change the law to allow all schools to hire foreign teachers to improve their foreign language teaching, but the Ministry of Education believed the proposal was inappropriate because of its potential impact on local teachers.
It was finally decided that only private elementary schools and junior high schools should be allowed to hire foreign teachers to teach their foreign language courses.
At present, there are only 22 private elementary schools and nine junior high schools across the country, while there are around 2,250 public elementary schools.
English will become a required subject in elementary schools nationwide starting in 2001, and the ministry is currently training about 3,500 local teachers to meet hiring needs.
Wu Ming-ching (
In principle, Wu said, foreign teachers should have an education background equivalent to local teachers' backgrounds, and the ministry may also require them to have a diploma in Teaching English as a Second Language.
"Foreign teachers that are hired should be able to teach better than local teachers," Wu said.
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