Bilingual nation not the be-all

The Ministry of Education on Monday said the government this year hopes to hire 1,096 foreign English teachers and teaching assistants. The foreign teachers would work closely with elementary and juniorhigh instructors to create immersive English-language learning environments, the ministry said.

The government in 2018 announced a policy aimed at making Taiwan a Mandarin-English bilingual nation by 2030. It outlined a strategy of providing English-language versions of all government Web sites, documentation and regulations; offering bilingual frontline assistance for all public services; requiring civil servants to be able to communicate in English; and offering certification exams for technical personnel in English.

Most of those are realistic aims, but the extent to which civil servants could hone their English communication skills would depend on their motivation and aptitude. To achieve any significant results schools would need to create an immersive environment by using English as the medium of instruction for all subjects. To study the plausibility and efficacy of such an approach, Taiwan could look at Canada’s French immersion programs.

Curricula are set at the provincial level in Canada, and vary from region to region, but optional French immersion is offered in all Canadian provinces except Quebec, and all territories except Nunavut. French immersion means that all subjects are taught using French, and is generally offered from kindergarten until the end of high school.

It must also be mentioned that in Canada it makes sense to offer French immersion and to promote fluency in the language, which has 7.2 million speakers in the country — accounting for 22.8 percent of Canada’s total population. French is one of Canada’s official languages, but even with immersion, few nonnative speakers of French in Canada can speak the language fluently.

In contrast, Taiwan has only a handful of nationals who are native English speakers, and they are mostly naturalized Republic of China citizens born in foreign countries, or those born to Taiwanese abroad.

The National Federation of Teachers’ Unions’ Publicity Department director Lo Te-shui (羅德水) said the same in an editorial titled “Bilingual policy must be stopped” published on April 26 last year.

“A country’s language policy has everything to do with its national development and identity. Taiwan has never been an English-speaking country, nor has it been colonized by an Anglophone country,” he wrote.

The government should be clear about the aim of its bilingual policy, and seriously evaluate its feasibility. It has been argued by its proponents that Taiwan would be internationally more competitive if Taiwanese spoke better English overall. Singapore has been invoked as proof of this argument, with proponents saying that Singapore’s use of English as one of its official languages is the reason so many international companies have a presence in that country.

However, South Korea and Japan — both economic powerhouses — prove otherwise. In the EF English Proficiency Index South Korea ranks 49th worldwide, placing it in the “moderate-proficiency” category, while Japan ranks 87th, putting it in the “low-proficiency” category. Yet both countries have an annual GDP in the trillions of US dollars. Taiwan also has a fairly large economy that is growing due to the importance of its semiconductors.

It is good that Taiwan’s government wants to make the country more competitive, but the money it is spending on bilingual education (NT$424.7 million, or US$13.28 million, over a three-year period from last year to 2025) would best be spent on funding education in technology. There will always be those who excel at learning languages, but it is not a must for everyone to do so.