Yunlin County’s Taixi Municipal Elementary School this month began offering classes in the Vietnamese language for the children of immigrant mothers.
Along with the Taixi New Immigrant Care Association, the Association for Promoting Taixi’s Fish Farming Rights and the school, Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Su Chih-feng (蘇治芬) undertook a fundraising drive to set up the class entitled, “Southeast Asian Cultural Education: Speaking Your Mother’s Language,” and to encourage Taiwanese businesspeople and tourists to bring back children’s books from Southeast Asia.
Taixi Township (台西) has a high number of immigrants, many of whom are Vietnamese women married to Taiwanese, and their children should be able to communicate with their mothers in Vietnamese, Yunlin County Councilor Huang Shu-ling (黃淑鈴) said, adding that the initiative has been strongly supported by local voters.
Teacher Huang Su-e (黃素娥), a new immigrant from Vietnam who has children, said that Vietnamese textbooks suitable for children are hard to find in Taiwan and she had to fill in the gaps when printed instructional material was not available.
Huang taught the school’s first-ever Vietnamese-language class while wearing a traditional dress.
While Vietnamese-language instruction is not prevalent in the public education system, the government’s promotion of its “new southbound policy” would make knowledge of Southeast Asian languages a competitive asset for Taiwan’s next generation, school principal Tai Chin-lung (戴進隆) said.
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