In a bid to promote English and to minimize the education gap between urban and rural areas, the Ministry of Education announced yesterday that it would launch a four-week English summer camp to teach elementary students from remote or mountainous regions via satellite.
Starting Monday, over 1,500 students from 53 elementary schools located in remote or mountainous areas around Taiwan, Penghu and Kinmen will be taking English lessons at their schools from native speakers through live satellite transmissions from Taipei.
The summer camp, organized by the ministry and supported by Era Digital Media, is a pilot plan to teach English to young students.
"Although the education gap between urban and rural areas is inevitable, we need to provide those studying in more remote areas with more resources in order to minimize the differences between urban and rural students," said Minister of Education Huang Jung-tsun (黃榮村) at a press conference yesterday.
The four-week camp is free of charge and the lessons are prepared for beginners. Participating students are required to attend classes during weekdays from 8am to 11am and they will watch a big screen projecting live interactive lessons taught by foreign teachers from a Taipei studio.
There will be 70 teachers from participating schools assisting the students online. The teachers arrived in Taipei yesterday to train for the courses.
According to the ministry, the plan is a pilot project and evaluations will be carried out when the courses are finished. In the future, similar programs may be implemented for different groups of students.
"This is an example of collaboration between government and private enterprises to promote English learning," said Deputy Minister of Education Fan Hsun-lu (范巽綠).
"Promoting English education to remote areas through satellite transmission is very effective because there are 287 schools that can't set up an ADSL line and over 1,000 schools with bad reception of either wire or wireless transmissions," she said.
Paying gratitude to the ministry for the effort to provide the English education service to students at Shing-kuang Elementary school (新光國小) in HsinChu County, the school principal, Hsu Jung-Chun (徐榮春), said that students studying in the school do not have as many resources as those living in the city.
"While others start learning English from kindergarten in private language centers [in the cities], our children begin in the fifth grade or later, " Hsu said.
The Ching Kuang Elementary School is situated in the mountains and its students are mostly aborigines.
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