The Ministry of Education will “encourage” primary school English teachers to participate in the General English Proficiency Test (GEPT) instead of requiring them to obtain high-intermediate GEPT credentials, a ministry official said yesterday.
The ministry would grant subsidies to teachers who would like to take the proficiency test so English teachers at primary schools could meet a certain proficiency level, the ministry’s Department of Elementary Education Director-General Yang Chang-yu (楊昌裕) told reporters.
Yang said applicants who gain a high-intermediate score would have an advantage when applying for teaching positions at elementary schools.
Primary school pupils in Taiwan generally begin English classes in third grade, but some schools start teaching English to students in first grade.
Ministry statistics show that there are 5,678 English teachers at the nation’s primary schools and half have no high-intermediate level GEPT credentials.
The ministry has been drafting new curriculum guidelines for elementary English classes. The guideline is scheduled to take effect in August 2011.
The ministry plans to improve the quality of English teaching in elementary schools by offering the examination subsidy as an incentive to improve the proficiency of English teachers.
In addition to the stipend to encourage teachers to take the test, the ministry may provide subsidies for teachers to join short-term study programs in the US, Yang said.
The ministry had planned to ask teachers to gain advanced level GEPT credentials, but decided it would not be practical.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
If China chose to invade Taiwan tomorrow, it would only have to sever three undersea fiber-optic cable clusters to cause a data blackout, Jason Hsu (許毓仁), a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislator, told a US security panel yesterday. In a Taiwan contingency, cable disruption would be one of the earliest preinvasion actions and the signal that escalation had begun, he said, adding that Taiwan’s current cable repair capabilities are insufficient. The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) yesterday held a hearing on US-China Competition Under the Sea, with Hsu speaking on
Taiwan is awaiting official notification from the US regarding the status of the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade (ART) after the US Supreme Court ruled US President Donald Trump's global tariffs unconstitutional. Speaking to reporters before a legislative hearing today, Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) said that Taiwan's negotiation team remains focused on ensuring that the bilateral trade deal remains intact despite the legal challenge to Trump's tariff policy. "The US has pledged to notify its trade partners once the subsequent administrative and legal processes are finalized, and that certainly includes Taiwan," Cho said when asked about opposition parties’ doubts that the ART was
The US’ joint strikes with Israel on Iran dismantled a key pillar of China’s regional strategy, removing an important piece in Beijing’s potential Taiwan Strait scenario, said Zineb Riboua, a senior researcher at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Middle East Peace and Security. In an article titled: “The Iran Question Is All About China,” Riboua said that understanding the Iran issue in the context of China’s “grand strategy” is essential to fully grasp the complexity of the situation. Beijing has spent billions of dollars over the years turning Iran into a “structural strategic asset,” diverting US military resources in the
RSS