The bid to turn Taiwan bilingual by 2030 could backfire and widen the English-language capability gap among students, telephone poll results showed on Friday.
The Grassroots Influence Foundation, which periodically conducts polls to determine public opinion on key government policies, said a majority of respondents expressed concern about the government’s Bilingual Nation 2030 campaign.
Sixty-two percent of the 1,111 respondents agreed when asked if they were worried the policy could lead to an “M-shaped” distribution with extreme high-performing and low-performing students in English, the foundation said.
Photo: Rachel Lin, Taipei Times
Twenty-nine percent rejected the premise, while 11 percent expressed no opinion in the survey conducted from May 29 to June 2, it said.
Under the government’s plan, schools in Taiwan at all levels are encouraged to expand English-language courses and programs.
The government has pledged to introduce English services in public facilities, as well as create an English-friendly environment nationwide.
However, 64 percent of respondents agreed that an increase in English-based courses is likely to make it more difficult for students to learn, and it could create more stress, the foundation said at a news conference.
English has been given an excessively high weighting in student’s studies, said Liao Hsien-hao (廖咸浩), dean of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences at National Taiwan University.
Advances in translation technologies have effectively made the bilingual nation policy redundant, Liao said, adding that students should devote less time to learning foreign languages.
The survey, which targeted individuals aged 18 or older, had a margin of error of 2.9 percentage points.
A petition on the government’s Public Policy Online Participation Network Platform calling for the bilingual policy to be dropped received more than 10,000 signatures — double the threshold required for a formal response — within one week of posting on April 7.
The government has said it would officially respond to the petition on July 14.
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