The Ministry of Education on Wednesday unveiled guidelines for teaching English, aiming to have 60 percent of schools use English as a the sole medium of instruction for the language by 2024.
Minister of Education Pan Wen-chung (潘文忠) said the ministry has intensified its efforts to train Taiwanese teachers of English and recruit foreign teachers of English to attain the nation’s goal of becoming a Mandarin-English bilingual country.
With a growing pool of English teachers, Pan said the 2021-2022 school year would become an important beginning for teaching the language.
The aim is to have teachers in 60 percent of elementary, junior and senior-high schools use only English to teach the language by 2024, he said.
English would also be used to teach other courses to improve students’ proficiency, he said, adding that by 2024, teachers in one-seventh of schools would be asked to teach courses in English.
Afterward, teachers in all schools would be asked to use English only to teach English classes by 2030, he said.
He added that teachers in one-third of schools would be asked to teach part of their courses besides English classes in a bilingual manner, also by 2030.
Pan said that high schools are a critical link to higher education, so the ministry is planning to have 50 high schools offer bilingual classes on a trial basis starting this school year.
Schools should make good use of the budget provided to run their bilingual classes this year, he said, adding that the bilingual classes would eventually be expanded to other schools.
Also, starting this school year, the ministry would launch a large-scale campaign to recruit foreign English teachers, he said.
As part of the recruitment effort, the ministry would have National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) and National Chung Cheng University set up counseling centers to provide assistance to foreign teachers, he said.
To help persuade foreign teachers to stay in Taiwan, the ministry would provide subsidies for their living expenses, including lodging and transportation, he added.
Earlier this year, the ministry said it would make National Taiwan University, NTNU, National Cheng Kung University and National Sun Yat-sen University as priority schools for bilingual teaching.
Making Taiwan bilingual by 2030 is a policy initiated by Vice President William Lai (賴清德) in 2018 when he was premier. In June that year, Lai made the “2030 Bilingual Country” plan a major national policy.
On Thursday last week, the Executive Yuan approved a draft bill to establish a national development center to advance the plan to develop Taiwan into a bilingual Chinese and English-speaking nation by 2030.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching