Taiwan’s demand for Vietnamese language teachers is higher than for teachers of other Southeast Asian languages, a Ministry of Education official said yesterday.
The high demand for teachers of Vietnamese is linked to the growing number of school-age children of immigrants from that country, the official said.
Based on the ministry’s data, 67 percent of Vietnamese language teacher positions are unfilled, while for Indonesian language teachers the figure is 18 percent, and for teachers of other Southeast Asian languages it is 15 percent.
The ministry has been evaluating its immigrant language program for years, including the demand for teachers and teaching materials, and it is ready to launch Vietnamese and Indonesian language classes in schools, K-12 Education Administration Director Tsai Chi-ming (蔡志明) said.
The ministry said it does not plan to begin Burmese, Cambodian, Philippine, Malaysian or Thai language learning classes as only a few students would be likely to enroll and there would be difficulty recruiting teachers.
There were 208,000 children of Southeast Asian immigrants in elementary and junior-high schools in Taiwan in 2015, 40.7 percent of whom were of Vietnamese heritage, 10.6 percent Indonesian and 2.2 percent Philippine, the data showed.
The government is rolling out the Southeast Asian language program with the aim of offering at least one foreign language option to all students in the K-12 system, and to help Taiwan-born children of immigrants learn their mother tongues so that they can work in Southeast Asia if they wish, Tsai said.
The government is also encouraging any young person to learn Southeast Asian languages as part of its “new southbound policy,” which seeks to develop closer ties with Southeast and South Asian countries, the ministry said.
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