Yesterday, I read an article discussing bilingual education in Taiwan and our government’s endeavor towards making people of Taiwan with a deeper “world view”. The author expressed disapproval to the government’s actions towards building a bilingual country and how the government tries to integrate the idea of Bilingual education into the New Southbound Policy, a concept by President Tsai.
Edit: welp, I can’t seem to find the article now.
Bilingual education isn’t something new in Taiwan. In fact, it’s been proposed several times over the years and finally initiated in early 2019 as part of the New Southbound Policy roadmap, aiming to “foster worldview in Taiwanese students.”
Now this article begs the question: bilingual (Mandarin & English in this case) education ≠ globalization, then why this when your promoting policy is the new southbound, which basically overlooks the fact that many southeast countries share more things in common with us than English speaking countries, culturally.
I support bilingual education because of several reasons, including that bilingual students statistically perform better than monolingual students do, and that learning another global language can’t hurt.
But of course, they always come with a number of, problems. Bilingual education is a substantial investment for the country and it is no doubt an expensive one.
Michael Chuang 