Taipei Times: Taiwan's government is planning to make English a semi-official language. Do you have any suggestions as to how the government should prepare to do this?
Seok Moi Ng: Singapore started working on making English its main official language way back in the 1970s. Taiwan's government should be patient in making English its second official language because language learning takes time, especially when you are talking about everybody, the whole country, using a new language.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE HSIN YI FOUNDATION
Taiwan should first look for what resources it has for English, what it can afford, because I don't think the government can afford to import a lot of overseas teachers. Taiwan already has some excellent teachers, so what it needs now is a very good teacher-training program. In fact, the government will have to spend a lot of time training local teachers because they are the ones who teach children.
The government should spend time on trials of English-language teaching programs before making the language your second official language. It will cause a lot of pain if you do it in a rush. Better to start small and go in stages.
TT: Do you think Taiwan should hire any teachers from overseas?
Ng: The government has to think very carefully about how any overseas teachers would be used. Are you going to use them as teachers or as trainers to train teachers? If they are hired as trainers, they must know how to train people. It is no use just taking anybody off the street who speaks English. They must know how to blend into the local culture and to work with local people.
Be very careful in considering hiring overseas teachers. There are countries which have imported a lot of overseas people, but encountered many problems because they failed to plan properly before doing so.
TT: How important are texts in English-language teaching? You have strongly recommended the use of story books in the teaching of children. In what ways are stories useful?
Ng: Stories are very important in teaching young children English, because children like listening to them. As a result they are more easily motivated when listening to stories.
As the children grow older, they should have other texts besides stories. Stories should always serve as the starter.
I believe, however, that teacher training is the most important thing in English teaching, much more important than the use of textbooks.
In teaching English, what we look for is the opportunity for children to be able to use it among themselves and with teachers. If teachers are well trained, they will be able to motivate the children in learning English.
TT: What if the children do not have the same English-speaking environment when they go home after school? Will their learning be less effective if their parents do not speak English to them at home?
Ng: In my previous projects in Hong Kong and Singapore, the children loved what they learned in school so much that they took the books home. At home, they sang English songs, read English stories and even asked their parents to join them when doing so. In many cases, parents learnt English from their children in this way.
What I mean is that children could create the environment for themselves and their parents to learn together.
When there is this two-way traffic occurring in which parents teach children Chinese and children help their parents in English, I regard this as the best situation that could happen.
The most effective way to learn a new language is to make sure that you are not afraid and that you have a very good learning environment.
TT: There are many children's English-language schools or kindergartens stressing an ``all-English environment.'' Do you think stopping children from speaking their mother tongue to create this English-speaking environment is an effective way to teach English?
Ng: The "all-English situation" is very bad because once you stop using your own language, you are losing your tradition and your pride in being Taiwanese.
Losing one's mother tongue is like losing one's mother. If you stop using your own language, the continuity, the richness that you and your country share, will be gone.
The other thing is that research into bilingual learning has shown that if a person's first language is strong, he or she will be better at learning a second language. This is because many linguistic concepts such as sentence structure and logic are applicable to both Chinese and English. Once the children have learned them in Chinese, the concepts will automatically transfer when they encounter English texts.
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