More than 200 kindergartens nationwide have joined a program that promotes the use of Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese), the Ministry of Education said on Tuesday.
The “immersive Hoklo learning for kindergartens” program has been adopted by 227 facilities, the K-12 Education Administration said in a statement, adding that the program seeks to ensure that the language is widely used.
The agency has collaborated with National Taichung University of Education to push a government initiative to promote national languages, it said.
Photo courtesy of the Ministry of Education via CNA
The program, launched in 2016, initially started with 37 classes at 10 kindergartens, it said.
The agency said it hopes that interactive teaching methods would help children foster the habit of using Hoklo in everyday life to express themselves naturally.
Wanlai Kindergarten, a nonprofit institution in Changhua County, said its teachers are continuously creating new teaching materials in Hoklo to create an immersive Hoklo-language environment in its classes.
These include teaching children the names of food items, how to describe their taste and color, and other phrases often used in everyday conversation, it said.
The kindergarten also organizes field trips to Hoklo-speaking communities and cultural events, for example, to temples where the sea goddess Matsu is enshrined, it said.
Those activities seek to enable children to use Hoklo to speak about everyday experiences, it added.
The kindergarten affiliated with Simen Elementary School in Hsinchu City said it has tasked students with recording stories in Hoklo.
The kindergarten, which joined the program this year, said it makes all announcements and conducts events in Hoklo to foster an immersive environment for its students.
Thousands of bottles of Sriracha have been returned or destroyed after the discovery of excessive sulfur dioxide, a bleaching agent, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced on Tuesday. About 12,600 bottles totaling 9,991.8kg of the hot sauce imported from the US by Emporium Corp (河洛企業) were flagged at the border for containing illegal levels of sulfur dioxide, the FDA said in its regular border inspection announcement. Inspectors discovered 0.5g per kilogram of the common bleaching agent and preservative, higher than the 0.03g permitted, it said. As it is the first time within six months the product has been flagged, Sriracha products from
Two people were killed and another nine injured yesterday after being stung by hornets while hiking in New Taipei City’s Rueifang District (瑞芳), with officials warning against wearing perfume or straying from trails during the autumn to avoid the potentially deadly creatures. Seven of the hikers only sustained minor injuries after being stung along the Bafenliao Hiking Trail (八分寮) and made their way down the mountain with a guide, the New Taipei City Fire Department said. Four of them — all male — sustained more serious injuries and were assisted when leaving the mountain, the department said. Two of them, a man surnamed
CHANGES: While NCCU opened the nation’s first co-ed dorm in Mucha, a recent survey showed that Taiwanese are in favor of abolishing gender segregation at high schools National Chengchi University (NCCU) has opened a co-ed dormitory, a first in Taiwan among state-funded Taiwan universities. The 22 duplexes are at the renovated “Huanan New Village,” in Taipei City’s Mucha (木柵) area, near the NCCU campus, a school official said yesterday. Twenty-two out of 37 group applications were selected in a lottery draw to select who would be chosen to live in the units, which can either be shared by up to eight students if the unit has four bedrooms, or up to 10 students if it is a five-bedroom unit, officials said. Completed in 1964 for campus staff housing,
The Ministry of the Interior has banned the use of mirror photos on national identification cards. Taiwanese nationals were required to prepare a front-facing “half-body” color photo or digital photo taken within the past two years when applying for an identification card for the first time, However, the ministry has since removed the term “half-body” in the updated regulation due to complaints regarding its vagueness. Published on Tuesday last week, the amended regulation on the formats and photos of national identification cards includes the stipulation that the length of the portrait from the top of the head to the bottom of the
RSS