by Brian Hioe

語言:
English
Photo Credit: Tsai Ing-wen/Facebook

THE TSAI ADMINISTRATION’S Bilingual 2030 policy continues to come under fire from teachers’ groups, as well as both pan-Blue and pan-Green politicians, ahead of legislative review for the establishment of a “Bilingual Nation Development Center”.

In particular, the National Federation of Teachers Unions, as well as Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences at National Taiwan University dean Liao Hsien-hao held a press conference late last month to criticize the plan. Lawmakers Chen I-hsin of the KMT and Claire Wang of the NPP were also present.

In his comments, Liao cited that English proficiency is not necessarily a precondition for economic success in the Asia Pacific, even if the Tsai administration has framed the Bilingual 2030 policy as aimed at boosting Taiwan’s competitiveness internationally. Likewise, Liao brought up that advancements in artificial technology in the next decade might make it easier to communicate across languages.

More generally, the Tsai administration’s push for bilingual language policy has faced criticisms in past years on a number of fronts. One common criticism has been that the Bilingual 2030 policy privileges English over native languages, such as Taiwanese Hokkien, Hakka, and Indigenous languages, at a time when such languages are already under threat.

Another common criticism is regarding the improbability of the policy succeeding. Other bilingual countries in which English is an official language are largely former colonies of English-speaking Western powers, such as the US and the UK. Consequently, Taiwan is not a historically English-speaking country, even if it has its aims set on boosting competitiveness with Hong Kong and Singapore through promoting English-language education.

The Ministry of Education. Photo credit: Chi-Hung Lin/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 3.0

Some calls, then, have been for the Tsai administration to instead promote a multilingual language policy rather than an exclusive focus on English.

Pushback against the original Bilingual Nation 2030 policy eventually led the policies to be rebranded as Bilingual 2030. However, the amended policy has continued to face many of the same criticisms.

Although few critics of the bilingual language policy advanced by the Tsai administration deny that improving English proficiency in Taiwan would be useful, bilingual language policy by way of “Bilingual Nation 2030” and “Bilingual 2030” have been criticized as unnecessarily complicating the work of teachers.

Namely, there are not very clear standards for improving English proficiency among students, as well as having enough educators with proficient English to teach students. Likewise, the policy has been criticized for failing to provide clear educational materials that teachers can use for teaching or assessing English capacity.

The original proposition for bilingual language policy would have entailed making English an official language. This came under fire, however, because of the complexities of duplicating official documents at all levels of government in English, which would have proved a logistical impossibility.

Consequently, the idea seems to have been quietly dropped, even if the Tsai administration still maintains a focus on promoting bilingual language policy in education. At this point, it is unclear whether this policy is advanced with concrete aims in mind, or if the Tsai administration hopes to tout this as a political accomplishment before the end of its term.

At the same time, schools across Taiwan have begun touting English education nonetheless. This takes place due to the fact that Taiwan’s declining birthrate means that many educational institutions face a lack of students, risking closures. A contributing factor is that Taiwan saw an explosion in the number of colleges and universities from 28 in 1985 to 145 by 2005, resulting in there being too many educational institutions than is needed. In many cases, schools with insufficient enrollment have begun to turn toward students from Southeast Asian countries, offering more English language courses as a result. This dovetails with the government pressing harder on the issue of promoting English language education with Taiwanese students in mind.

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Brian Hioe

Brian Hioe is one of the founding editors of New Bloom. He is a freelance journalist, as well as a translator. A New York native and Taiwanese-American, he has an MA in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University and graduated from New York University with majors in History, East Asian Studies, and English Literature. He was Democracy and Human Rights Service Fellow at the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy from 2017 to 2018 and is currently a Non-Resident Fellow at the University of Nottingham's Taiwan Studies Programme.

丘琦欣，創建破土的編輯之一，專於撰寫社會運動和政治的自由作家偶而亦從事翻譯工作。他自哥倫比亞大學畢業，是亞洲語言及文化科系的碩士，同時擁有紐約大學的歷史，東亞研究及英文文學三項學士學位。

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One Response

  1. Michael Woods

    I’m an Australian teacher who has just retired from teaching English for 30 years in Taiwan. I’ve seen many favorable changes in Taiwan education across the whole curricula, and I’ve been very active bringing modern pedagogy to Taiwan ever since my first week here. I was recruited into the new public schools bilingual program, and after a number of years I agree with the critics, that the 2030 goals are unobtainable under the present structure.
    To understand the growing criticism of the bilingual program, one must look at the broader picture of education in general. The criticism of the bilingual program is really a reflection of the huge amount of frustration felt by professional educators with the traditional system not meeting the real needs of their students. The whole program must be seen within the larger context of modern education reform rather than separated into subjects in the traditional way. Separating learning into disparate unconnected subjects using the traditional method of textbooks and exams stifles how students really want to learn. They see it as irrelevant to their lives, so they are disengaged making it so difficult for passionate educators to enjoy teaching.
    The simple solution for these issues is to give autonomy to the schools to teach English within an integrated streamlined syllabus designed by teams of teachers in their schools based on the wide range of student levels. Giving freedom to teachers to design their own curricula to make all their subjects and English relevant to the students’ lives would greatly increase efficiency and productivity, leading to success and teacher student satisfaction.
    The present system focusing on foreign teachers is massively inefficient and wasteful. Greater productivity would be achieved if the money was spent on incentivizing bilingual Taiwanese teachers to teach English as part of their homeroom syllabus. This would mean that there would be time to teach all the English skills, instead of the present foreign teacher set up where they teach 300 students for only 1-2 hours a week. How can the students progress in this way? No wonder there is frustration among teachers and students. Using local bilingual teachers, even though few in number now, would maintain continuity of teachers and content which would allow productivity to eventually surpass the present program. It is far more efficient to retain experienced skilled teachers, but at present all of this is lost because foreign teachers usually leave after a short stint in Taiwan. It would be far better to use the limited number of skilled experienced foreign teachers more efficiently as consultants in the training of the Taiwanese bilingual teachers.
    In summation, from my many years in Taiwan, the education system would be far more successful if it freed up the teachers from traditional methods, taught English within an integrated curricula with team teaching; and reallocated the budget from foreign teachers to spending the money on developing local bilingual homeroom teachers by paying more for extra skills. This would be a grassroots, top down solution that would rapidly achieve the long term goals Taiwan needs. Over my 30 years in Taiwan I’ve met some wonderful Taiwanese educators and have not the slightest doubt this wonderful country could easily achieve these elusive goals.

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