Mythbusting Bilingual by 2030

I dunno, this just seemed like a good photo to illustrate the current debate around Bilingual by 2030

There is an ongoing series of interesting and worthwhile dialogues in Taipei affiliated with Fulbright and Taiwan NextGen which include discussions of the Bilingual by 2030 initiative: there's one tomorrow, (most likely today by the time you read this). Having attended the last one, I am considering returning, but I need to be available for last-minute feeback and questions for trainees who are doing their teaching demonstrations on Sunday, and I'll always prioritize them. 

However, I thought this would be a good opportunity to "mythbust" some common misconceptions about Bilingual by 2030. I've noticed a lot of people believe things about it which are simply not true. Others have decided what they'd like their opinion on it to be without giving it a fair hearing: it's so tempting and easy to project one's already-extant beliefs about English being a harbinger of Big Bad Globalization onto it, without fully considering where it may have merit. 

I'm not here to tell you if it's a "good" or "bad" plan, although I can say that I started out highly cynical, but was gradually won over by dedicated professionals who saw a lot of good in it, and have been doing what I can to ensure it's implemented in a thoughtful and effective way. If my mind can be changed, I hope yours can too. 

"Taiwan wants to prioritize only English and Mandarin, that's why it's called 'Bilingual' by 2030"

The name "Bilingual by 2030" is certainly sub-optimal, and cringey tweets from Vice President William Ching-te Lai don't help correct the view that the plan sidelines and potentially threatens a renewed interest in local languages. I strongly suspect many negative opinions of the policy come from hearing the name and pulling a face. I agree: it sounds pretty bad. The NDC document (linked in the next section) re-iterates that Lai and others have expressed this English-Mandarin binary, however, it does not incorporate this view into the actual policy:

Side by side with implementation of the bilingual nation policy, equal importance will also be attached to the promotion of native-language culture. Taiwan in the future will be a nation of diverse ethnicities and languages.The bilingual policy will be parallel to the pluralistic development of mother tongues, and its implementation will not constrain native language education.

Having interacted with the NDC on this issue, I do believe they are a few steps ahead -- and a few notches more thoughtful -- than the government at large, but the intent is there to focus on improving language education in general, not "bilingualism". 

Will this attempt to be more pluralistic and promote both English and local languages and cultures be successful? I have no idea, but this is a more egalitarian, local-context-situated take on foreign language education than I've seen from any previous policy. Frankly, it's a step forward that they thought to include it at all. 

Will implementation be insufficient? Probably, and local language education is currently insufficient as well. But Bilingual by 2030 hasn't been implemented in any meaningful way yet, so it would be odd to blame it for an already-existing problem.

If this is the case, why is it labeled "Bilingual by 2030" rather than, say, "Multilingual Taiwan" (my preferred nomenclature)? Honestly, this is just thickheadedness. The plan is based on an initiative that began in Tainan when Lai was the mayor, so it's his 'baby', and to that end, it seems that the blame for this baby's unfortunate name lies with the father. I can't say much, but I happen to know that Lai was told the name was problematic by experts back when it was a city initiative; he didn't listen. 

The subtleties of this do matter: the writers of the actual policy are clearly trying to do the right thing and craft a useful policy out of a cringey focus on "bilingualism". That said, they most likely don't have the power to demand a better name, because that's how power works. Understanding this is key to useful advocacy. 

"Taiwan wants to make English an official language by 2030"

Other than a quick review of Lai's involvement in the policy's formation, the actual policy document addresses this one time:

With regard to promoting English as the nation’s second official language, this would be studied and discussed again after 2030, in light of the executive review of the results of the bilingual policy’s implementation.

This is most likely a polite way of saying that the government and NDC don't actually want to do this, but Lai thinks they should, so they're humoring him while putting off the actual question. I merely suspect this; I cannot confirm it. But I've been here long enough that I've hopefully gained some competence in translating "Taiwanese Governmentese" into something more comprehensible. 

Whether I'm right or wrong, it's right there in plain text: perhaps the issue of making English an "official language" will be taken up in the future, but it will not happen as part of Bilingual by 2030. 


"The plan is to make every citizen bilingual by 2030"

Nowhere in the actual policy does it say this. While it does list improving the English proficiency of Taiwanese citizens as a policy objective, it very wisely does not go so far as to say that the goal is for every citizen to be forced to learn English, or for everyone to be proficient in it to some degree. In terms of language education, it talks about improving the way languages are taught, without stipulating any specific outcomes. In terms of "improving proficiency", it focuses on government employees and front-line workers who interact with foreigners regularly (such as tourism and hospitality professionals). Frankly, that seems like a pretty smart focus: they're the people who would need English the most in a more international, multicultural Taiwan. 

Improving the overall English proficiency of Taiwanese labor is also included, but it's important to note that none of the details of this part of the plan would force anyone to actually improve or learn English: the idea is to make online work applications, advisory services and handbooks bilingual, and encourage companies to offer English classes to employees. I've taught Business English for many years, and I can say that your average trainer in this field is more concerned with providing an environment to practice and enhance existing language skills -- which is the most optimal way to help trainees actually improve, though it's less quantifiable -- not crack the whip, administer tests and pour homework on already-overworked learners.

Indeed, much of the plan involves improving English-language government services, including improved websites, application services, financial services, procurement contracts and a whole bunch of other boring crap that really needed to have been done a decade ago. Who can argue that all of those things require improvement?  

This all feeds into the actual goals of what the NDC has crafted: a plan to nudge Taiwan towards offering a more welcoming international environment, not enforcing some sort of linguistic imperialist nightmare hellscape in which not speaking English or Mandarin will earn you a paddlin'. 

"The changes in education simply won't work"

Not with that attitude they won't! 

Seriously, this is the area where people's concerns are the most valid. On one hand, my professional opinion is that the language learning methodology that Bilingual by 2030 promotes is sound. 

You might say that's just my opinion, but I literally have a Master's in this, as I took a deep look at Bilingual by 2030 as part of my dissertation which focused on intercultural communicative competence. What's more, my primary work right now is in teacher training. If there are two things I know extremely well, they are intercultural communication and teaching methodology in the language classroom. I'm so methods, I'm post-methods, baby! 

CLIL (content and language integrated learning -- careful scaffolding of the learning of subject matter in a foreign language) does have promising research behind it. It helps eliminate the issues inherent in low-content, low-context "general English" classes. When you see language learners failing to learn,  common causes include sub-optimal teaching as a result of washback from inappropriate testing methods, inauthenticity (learning that doesn't prioritize or promote real communication, and is thus rendered both useless and unengaging), and insufficient exposure (extended exposure plus interaction forms the backbone of the interactionist theory of language learning -- I wrote a paper on this, but won't bore you). 

Sadly, the Taiwanese education system is plagued by all three issues. CLIL might not solve the testing issue, but it does help bypass it: if you have to learn actual content in English and are tested on the content, it matters less if the exams for your language classes are inappropriate. It creates a more robust environment with more exposure and more real content in which you have to communicate authentically in order to learn. General language classes very often lack such content, either out of fear that it's "too hard", "too controversial" or "not necessary", in favor of grammar exercises, translating sentences and the occasional boring story about boring blonde kids doing boring things. 

In short, if the plan is implemented the way the NDC clearly wants it to be, it actually could work. The methodology and theory behind it is sound, thoughtful and modern. 

However, concerns about Bilingual by 2030's viability in classrooms are valid: there seems to be no effort to reform the examination system which plagues Taiwanese education like a relentless metastasized cancer. Focus on that instead of complaining about an approach that actually has a professional stamp of approval (and not just mine). 

"It does nothing to address the wealth and urban/rural divides"

This is a legitimate concern. The policy document proffers an insufficient solution:

When the government implemented bilingual policies in the past, limitations of teachers and funding made it difficult to apply them with uniformity nationwide. But now, emerging technologies and digital learning platforms can reduce the urban-rural divide, helping children in remote rural areas enjoy the same English learning resources as their peers in cities enjoy.

Yawn. Who phoned this section in? Because it's terrible. 

There is in fact a way to bridge these societal divides: training up local teachers to be not only effective CLIL and language teachers and reforming the testing system to give them the flexibility they need to teach properly, but to recruit the best among them to be trained up and mentored as trainers, able through sheer number to reach more school districts in more remote and underserved and marginalized areas. More than one person shares this goal: watch this blog for more, someday -- I hope. 

Will the Taiwanese government actually do this? I hope so, but as of now it still seems to be stuck in a native speakerist "must recruit foreigners" mode. I'm not against foreign teachers coming here in general, but this particular initiative certainly won't help. It will create animosity as local teachers see they are being paid less than these newcomers who don't know the local context and don't speak any local language, there won't be enough of them to reach rural and underserved schools, there's no guarantee they will actually be trained in CLIL (most likely not), and no clear outline has been set for what they will actually do once here. 

"It's 2030 is totally new and overly ambitious"

Not really. The push to "internationalize" and encourage "intercultural communication" through bolstering English classes has been at the core of the education initiatives of several administrations. At the turn of the century, English classes were introduced in elementary school, in Grade 5 and later Grade 3. Aims included “improving students’ basic communicative competence” and “addressing cross-cultural issues”. In 2015, the Ministry of Education issued new guidelines with more explicit intercultural aims, aiming to cultivate future professionals who can “effectively communicate and interact with people from different countries”. You can read all about this in Chou and Ching's Taiwan Education at the Crossroad and Lin and Byram (eds) New Approaches to English Language and Education in Taiwan, or if you know me, you can ask to borrow them. 

"The turn of the century" would have been the Chen administration, though his was certainly not the first government to announce such initiatives. 2015 was the Ma administration. In fact, Bilingual by 2030 is not particularly new: it's an iteration of ongoing government initiatives.

"Bilingual by 2030 is just another iteration of the same old government initiatives"

It's not really that, either. Although it turns out I still have institutional access, I just don't have the energy right now to go and find all of those old documents. However, from my memory, they mostly stated an intention to do so, but never got very far in terms of actually changing the way languages are taught. I don't know to what extent the architects of those plans engaged professional opinions, but it doesn't seem to have been sufficient make a difference. If they had been more successful, the major exams would have been reformed by now, but they still lack any sort of communicative element; in fact, there's no speaking section at all on the English portion of the university entrance exam. 

Bilingual by 2030 has some serious issues in actual implementation, and while there's a great deal of funding, it's unclear what will be done with much of it, although some of it I can say is well-spent. 

If anything can change the way language is taught in Taiwan, it's something like this. If you asked me as a language teaching professional to come up with a plan to improve such classes, it would look a lot like this. 

"Teachers are against Bilingual by 2030"

We don't know that; nobody seems to have asked them yet. Mostly, K-12 teachers report being willing to implement more modern, communication-based approaches, but feel they can't due to the pressures -- again -- of the exams. Anecdotally, I've interacted with a lot of teachers at the university level. Although they were mostly a self-selecting group, they seemed more enthusiastic than not. What's more, a good friend and fellow classmate who teaches in a Taiwanese junior high school reports general enthusiasm for the new plan among younger teachers. She added that the (mostly older) teachers who gripe about it are generally concerned with being encouraged to teach using new approaches which may require additional training, which is generally not a good reason to oppose new education policies. Most peers I've talked to in teacher training start out skeptical, as I did, but changed their minds after giving the plan a close read. The general consensus is that if implemented in a principled way, it has the potential to be a beneficial approach.

"We should make Taiwanese an official language instead!" 

First, a quick reminder that the goal of Bilingual by 2030 is not to make English an "official language" by 2030. 

Second, I strongly support bolstering Taiwanese language promotion, education and resources. I would love to see that and the other languages of Taiwan -- the many Indigenous languages and Hakka -- gain such recognition and popularity. There is an element of rediscovering local identity in this approach: as I noted in a podcast with Donovan Smith, there's an argument to be made that Mandarin, a colonial language imported from China and forced on Taiwan in some horrifically cruel ways, is about as relevant to Taiwanese identity as English, which is a part of Taiwanese history as well given the historic closeness of Taiwan and the US compared to other countries. 

I am sure there are people who will hate me for saying that, but there is indeed an argument to be made. In that context, a focus on local identity is crucial, and this is one smart area for advocacy.

However, that's an argument for promoting the use of local/mother languages, not against English per se. Not everyone has to learn English, just as not everyone has to learn Hakka or Atayal. It would be great if improved teaching methods could empower learners to choose the languages relevant to them and make it easier to learn them simply because they are taught more effectively, and the teaching methods proposed in Bilingual by 2030 are promising in their efficacy. 

In other words, this isn't Highlander. There can be more than one. Of course, language learning is not neutral: the tides and eddies of imperialism, colonialism and cultural supremacy vs. erasure are inherently tied to it. However, that's an after-effect of history, not the language itself. Taiwan also has the benefit of never having been colonized by an English-speaking nation, so what it means to learn English here is not quite the same as what it means in post-colonial English-speaking societies. In fact, if the primary colonial language is Mandarin, then how is English the bad guy in this context? It is in fact possible to do better. 

Or as a friend put it, he once thought of English as just another agent of colonialism and thus opposed it. then he realized it was simplistic and trite to just slap the same anti-Western label on every single thing. When he talked about feeling brutalized by language learning -- "like they cut your tongue" -- he was talking about Mandarin, not English. 

I know it's cool to default to hating the West, and there certainly are a lot of things to hate. But I'm not cool, so I feel confident in not hating this particular thing. We can have both the local and the global. Taiwan has accomplished more astonishing things than that; it can surely succeed if it wants to. 

"Taiwan doesn't need English as a foreign language"

Many individuals probably don't, no. Learners who are not motivated to learn it would either become motivated if the learning environment were to become more authentic and communicative, or they'd continue to lack interest, in which case they would not be forced to take CLIL courses -- and that's fine too. English is not currently required for the vast majority of jobs in Taiwan, and that probably wouldn't change much.

However, as a society, I'd argue Taiwan does in fact need English, a point I've noted before. Not being particularly interested in business, I remain neutral on "international competitiveness" in industry. It's fine I guess, but it just doesn't arouse any sort of internal passion. After all, I've spent my life being surprisingly well-paid for someone who so thoroughly repudiates the idea of a corporate job.

You can talk all you want about how South Korea and Japan do just fine without high English proficiency (though it seems to me their governments push it just as much as Taiwan). However, nobody doubts the existence of Japan and South Korea as countries. Taiwan has to fight every single day for even the most basic international recognition. 

To participate in that discourse, you need English. Without making a moral judgement, you just do -- I know firsthand that activists who have wanted to engage in such participation at one point felt held back by their self-perceived lack of skill in the language. Taiwan has the power, if it wants it, to appropriate English for its own ends, as a tool to fight for international recognition.

It wouldn't be the first country where learners thought to do so, either. From a student evaluation form in Palestine sometime before 2017: 

We need to learn how to resist by using the Western language in order to convey our message and our voice to the whole world.

Sound familiar?

Conclusion

Hate on Bilingual by 2030 if you want, but hate on it for the right reasons. If the alternative is the way language is (mostly) taught in Taiwan now, it's honestly a huge step forward. If you want to criticize it for its proposed teaching approach, don't. Or at least, don't complain to me. If you want to complain that the government should not spend resources improving access in English to vital information and websites, what is wrong with you? 

If you want to criticize it for not centering local languages enough, that's fine. But remember that this isn't an either/or situation. Use that energy to advocate for local language education and use, not against English. If you want to complain that it probably won't succeed, that's fine too, but perhaps look at the real issues with implementation: the lack of proposed reform of the major examinations, the focus on recruiting native speakers rather than training local talent, the lackluster focus on local languages despite the NDC's best intentions, and the half-assed approach to bridging the urban-rural divide. This is smarter than criticizing it because it burnishes your anti-Western cred. 

This will be much easier to do if we all let go of the myths that have been built around Bilingual by 2030 and stop wasting energy talking about non-issues. There are real problems to discuss, so I propose we get to it.

The Test is the Tumor

From a recently-closed exhibit at Tainan Art Museum

In a typical apartment in greater Taipei, my student and I chat about her week before looking at her school work and IELTS preparation. If an interesting subject comes up we dive a little deeper, to give her some practice articulating independent ideas. Even when I know things she doesn't, I prompt her to make rational guesses to get there on her own. She's pretty good at this and can communicate with very little problem, understanding and responding to natural spoken English at a fairly natural pace.

The tests she takes at her prestigious Taipei high school mostly consist of multiple-choice gap fills of complex grammar and lexis into long paragraphs, or translation. She's good at this too -- better than I would be in a foreign language -- but sometimes they include lexis she's never learned. I ask how her teacher conducts English class. "She has us read the paragraphs out loud. Then she translates them into Chinese for us, and we take notes on the parts we don't understand in English." Does she ever make you speak at all? "Sometimes to answer a question, like what's the answer to #3." Does she ever speak to her peers in English? "Never." Has she ever been asked to express a single idea, or even a sentence, that she created in her own head? "Absolutely not."

She takes a lot of these tests, as preparation for The Big Test. Or rather, Big Tests, because they appear to proliferate like tumors in a failing organ. Not a single one of these tests, Big or Small, includes any sort of actual foreign language communication.

In the part of Taipei that exists in the ether (that is, an online community), someone theorizes that English proficiency in Taiwan is low because Taiwanese are "shy" and "embarrassed" to make mistakes, speak out, take risks, whatever. That certainly is an easy explanation: things could be better, but, you know, culture.

Seven years ago this month, a group of activists stormed their own parliament, occupying it for weeks in order to protest the undemocratic passage of a trade pact. They barricaded doors, shouted, set up systems to stop the occupation from devolving into chaos, and held their ground until someone from the government responded. Some estimate that between 200,000-500,000 Taiwanese took to the streets to support them (my personal estimate is toward the higher end; I was in that crowd.) 

That occupation and the rally it inspired was unusual in its size, but Taiwanese people have been heading downtown to scream at their government ever since they could do so without getting shot (and sometimes even when they couldn't). That doesn't sound very shy or embarrassed to me. 

So this points to an issue not with culture, but with the tests. My student, the great communicator? The exams don't test that. If communication is the goal, they lack basic content and construct validity, because they do not test for communicative competence. There are no oral exams and the written portion is minimal. 

But the tests really matter in ways we can't dismiss -- they determine not only what schools you can attend, but what you can major in. Although they are worthless, the doors they open aren't: it's no wonder people take them seriously.

This curdles into negative washback. I can only speak authoritatively on English language proficiency, where the exams don't test communicative ability. So every school curriculum, almost every teacher syllabus, every class, every page of pointless multiple-choice and gap-fill homework, every metastasization of mock tests before the Big Test(s) all aim to help students not to learn English, but to do well on the test. And then people wonder why English is treated like a school subject rather than a communication tool.

Think of all the bad teaching, kids not learning, parents' traditional thinking, Taiwanese don't like to communicate in English, schools don't teach critical thinking, student don't think English class is useful that you hear. They're like nausea, tiredness and chronic pain: they're all symptoms stemming from the same source: the tests.

The tests are the tumors. You can treat the symptoms -- we need better coursebooks! More teacher training! -- and there might be some improvement, but it won't excise the cancer that's causing the problems.

But that's culture too! I hear you shouting. It's, y'know, Confucian! Traditional! That's how culture works -- it happens once in ancient history and then it never changes!

But it's not. Research among English language teachers in Taiwan has shown that they are aware of more modern teaching methods, and  elementary school teachers are more willing to implement them. Junior high and high school teachers also report willingness, but say that the necessity of preparing students for the major exams is the key reason why they don't do so. Researchers studying English language teaching programs in Taiwan also point out that English teaching curricula and government initiatives are based on outdated assumptions of how and why English is taught and learned. (Incidentally, I have met Drs. Kao, Tsou and Chen, and they all strike me as an exceptional scholars. If you care about English learning in Taiwan, you should be paying attention to their work.)

Anecdotally, I know that Chen is right about schoolteachers being open to communicative teaching approaches in principle. One of my jobs entails working with them; to be fair, the ones who sign up are a self-selecting group of particularly engaged teachers. As we collaborate, it becomes clear that they're already familiar with the core concepts underpinning communication and core-skills oriented professional development. And yet they're also frustrated. With large class sizes and looming exams, how can any of it be practically applied in the classroom? They'd love to teach towards better English language communication, but how can they when that's not on any of the tests, and the tests really matter?

If it was "the culture" holding Taiwan back, then these teachers' responses would have been quite different, or at least based on different reasoning, and Taiwanese voices would not be advocating for updated approaches to English teaching.

Everything they recommend -- better materials, more classroom resources, orienting foreign language education toward an English as a Lingua Franca, more professional development for teachers -- is useful and necessary. But again, these are treatments for symptoms. Teachers don't teach language communicatively because of the looming exams the students must take. English is treated as a school subject because the test makes it one. Teaching approaches and attitudes toward English are symptoms. The test is the tumor.

It's hard to justify the notion that test-driven learning is somehow endemically Taiwanese. "Ancient" Confucian-style learning did include a great deal of memorization, but the student-teacher relationship also mattered, and the test of true brilliance wasn't whether the  mature student could regurgitate what they'd learned, but whether they could put it into practice. Koxinga wasn't considered a brilliant general -- his other numerous failings notwithstanding -- because he had read The Art of War. It was because he could use that advice effectively in battle. 

Not that it matters. For the period when Taiwan was colonized by the Qing, they did little to develop education in Taiwan. Only the sons of the very wealthy attended Confucian academies, which funneled students into the imperial civil service. "Temple schools" weren't worth much either. Here's Manthorpe in Forbidden Nation telling you how that worked for Taiwan:

There was no encouragement for Taiwanese to re-enter the mainstream of the Chinese civil service, even though tuition was made available in 1686....There is no record of an islander passing the second-degree examinations until 1729. In the entire two hundred years of Qing rule, Taiwan produced only 251 second-degree holders. The third and highest-level civil service examinations were always held in the Chinese capital, Beijing, and there is no record of Taiwanese taking part until 1822, when eleven men from the island sat for the tests; only one qualified to become a government official. As far as can be determined, no Taiwanese civil servant ever worked on the island during the Qing tenure.

Then the Japanese came along and implemented their own educational system, mostly in order to equip Taiwanese to be good workers and obedient colonial subjects, assimilated into the Japanese empire but never co-rulers of their own territory or questioning the Japanese identity imposed upon them. There's a lot of history here, which I'll sum up in a quote about the early Japanese attitude toward education from Tsurumi's Japanese Colonial Education in Taiwan: 

The policy was to...avoid creating or encouraging any general demand for higher education among Taiwanese. Gotō bluntly told his education personnel that they must take care to see that Taiwanese did not become educated above their stations in life. 

That system turned into one where learning basic literacy and numeracy along with cultural assimilation were the key benchmarks of education. One was never taught to ask too many questions or get too ambitious, although some Taiwanese were able to attain university educations as Japanese rule wore on. When you don't want the general population to think very critically, what happens in the classrooms? The same sort of exam-based regurgitation we see in Taiwan now.

That was the system the KMT inherited when they colonized Taiwan, and to be blunt, they thought it was an excellent brainwashing tool, simply replacing Japanese cultural assimilation with Chinese. The ask-no-questions, just-take-tests orientation was certainly kept in place. I suppose from the KMT's perspective, it saved bullets if people never asked questions in the first place.

What Taiwan has today is essentially that system. Does any of that sound like an education system built from Taiwan's cultural roots? Because to me it seems like a succession of colonizers either ignoring education entirely or imposing their own ideas on what that education should be like. I'm all for immigration, but if immigrants are good for a society, like probiotic yoghurt for your gut, colonizers are carcinogens, like microplastics in your fish.

Do we even know what education through a Taiwanese cultural lens would be like, seeing as it never seems to have been tried? Here's just a taste of what direction this could take:

In addition to being the seventh anniversary of the Sunflower Movement, this month is also the 25th anniversary of Taiwan's first free and full democratic election, a feat that would have been impossible if not for dedicated Taiwanese activists resisting everything that had been shoved down their throats in school. From my student -- the great communicator -- who didn't learn English in school so much as from parents and relatives who spoke it, to these generations of activists who also learned to think critically everywhere but school, it's clear that these ways of learning have a place in the culture here. An education system based on that could be very exciting indeed.

In a society, however, people have a range of beliefs and perceptions. Not long ago, I was talking to a friend in the cafe the Eslite Hsinyi. Her daughter is in high school. and my friend was complaining about the new requirements -- they look at your exam scores but also your "portfolio", which can include just about anything. Things like music lessons or playing a sport tend to fare well. 

"My daughter has to do all of that on top of getting good grades and taking the exam!" she lamented. "It's not fair!"

"I agree it's too much, but the problem is the test," I said. "What's unfair about everything else?"

"It benefits rich families. With the test, if you studied hard, you could do well no matter how poor you were. Everyone had a chance."

I pointed out that this had never been true; for English, the test is not only biased towards students who handle rote memorization well and against those who are simply good communicators, but it also privileges the families who can afford the expensive buxibans that prepare their children for it. We discussed the fact that places at Taiwan's top schools are dominated by the children wealthier urban families (I've seen data for this but can't seem to find it; if I do I'll come back and link). If the tests are "fair" and "any bright child who studies hard can succeed", then that gap should not exist. Yet it does.

The belief that the test is "fair" sits alongside the open secret that you need to pay for expensive buxibans in order to access that "fairness". This is also supported by the industry, which carries significant political clout. If parents believe that their own children might not get the maximum benefit from all that "fairness", and a wealthy special interest group benefits from the continuation of that myth, it can be very hard to fight indeed. Cancer usually is.

The result is hours of physically and mentally unhealthy rote learning on a hamster wheel that nobody seems to know how to stop. My neighbor's children come over for an hour a week of English practice. When we met on Tuesdays, they could barely stay awake, even through games they otherwise tended to enjoy. We switched to Wednesdays and their energy levels improved. I asked why one day, and they told me that their math buxiban ends at 9pm on Mondays, and then they go home and do homework. "We went to bed at one-thirty," they said. And when did they wake up? "Six-twenty." 

Why? "Because this week we have tests every day." Which subjects? "All of them." Are those the big tests? "No, that's next week." So what are these tests? "Practice." 

So when do you actually learn? They shrugged their shoulders. They had understood the question; they just didn't know the answer. 

It would be easy to blame the parents for pushing their kids through such an exhausting, expensive and traumatizing system which doesn't even promote core learning skills, the kids who obediently run that treadmill and the teachers who operate the machinery. It would be easy to castigate them all for not valuing "critical thinking". That's too simplistic, however. They're all just trying to survive in a system none of them can change alone. Their attitudes aren't the problem, they're a symptom. The test is the tumor. 

This attitude can lead to dark outcomes, as well. Years ago someone asked my advice about her teenage nephew. He lived in a far-flung New Taipei suburb and woke up at 5am every day to commute to school in Taipei, an hour and a half each way. Then he'd go to buxiban in Taipei until 10pm, before slogging home and doing homework until well past midnight. Then he'd wake up at 5 and do it all again. Weekends meant more buxiban, and more homework. The college entrance exams were coming, but honestly, she said, it had been going on for years.

She offered more details about their last meeting, which had concerned her greatly. I can't tell that story without being more specific than I feel comfortable with, but his behavior was worrying enough that I advised that he not only see a doctor, but that his parents do something about the untenable school situation. At best, he was dangerously exhausted. 

The concerned aunt fell out of my orbit not long after, and I never found out what happened to her nephew. Regardless of whether my advice triggered any change, I hope he found his way through. 

Why does all of this matter now? I could have written this post at any point over the last 13 years that Lao Ren Cha has existed. 

Well, I'm a foreign language teaching professional, and Bilingual by 2030 has been in the news of late. It seems everyone has an opinion. Can CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) and EMI (English as a Medium of Instruction) succeed? What does it mean to teach English as a tool rather than a school subject? Should be importing foreign teachers, training local ones or both? What support should other foreign and local languages receive? Why does Taiwan need to improve its overall English proficiency at all? What does internationalization mean? How can we ensure the rich-poor and urban-rural divide isn't deepened? What role do critical thinking skills play? (I'm leaving out some of the less thoughtful takes; not everyone with an opinion has actually read the policy document.) 

These questions matter, but every last one of them is asking about treatment of a symptom. If, throughout years of English classes, students are subjected to multiple batteries of tests -- so many tests that they literally don't know when actual learning is meant to occur -- then it doesn't matter if the teachers are foreign or local, trained or not. They will prepare students for those tests. English will be treated as a school subject because the test renders it one. The test is the tumor.

If the goal of the Tsai administration and the Ministry of Education is to improve proficiency and communicative ability, and for Taiwan to be an internationally-accessible country with more global visibility, that won't happen if the assessments of educational attainment don't test proficiency or communicative ability. There are tests that do indeed aim to assess proficiency, such as IELTS. That test is problematic in its own way, but the English language exams students take in public schools don't even try.

It won't matter whether they're pushing general English classes with communicative teaching, or CLIL and EMI. It won't matter that research shows these methods tend to work, especially if they are implemented in earlier grades, although there are several factors influencing this. Students, teachers and parents will resist subject courses in English as long as there's a difficult and competitive test at the end, and preparing for it is slowed down by learning in a second language.

Arguably, the main reason why Taiwanese students spend years in English classes but do not always come out proficient in English comes down to negative washback from the tests. The tests don't assess communicative ability, so communication is not part of the class. The proficiency issues that these methods aim to treat are symptoms. Societal resistance to changing those classroom approaches? A symptom. The test is the tumor. 

No initiative -- not Bilingual by 2030, let alone anything that came before it -- is ever going to be successful if it doesn't treat the tumor.

This is arguably also a crucial time for Taiwan. I pointed out on Taiwan Context that one of the main reasons Taiwan needs English isn't to do business, it's to make itself heard on the international stage. In Pedagogies of Hope and Resistance, the teacher-researchers quote the thoughts of their Palestinian students, who say that they want to learn English to communicate with the West, so that people in other countries would know more about Palestine and their struggle. (Data on such perceptions is inconclusive, but anecdotally, I do see a change.)

Although I don't intend to make a direct analogy between Taiwan and Palestine, that same need exists in Taiwan. Palestinian students don't always learn English for job opportunities, and commentators love to point out that most Taiwanese workers won't need it, either. However, other countries -- such as Taiwan's peers, Japan and South Korea --don't need to constantly prove to the world that they are indeed countries. Taiwan does. To communicate that, its most ardent activists need English, and we can't know where those activists will come from until they're already in the education system.

With China inching closer to a long-threatened invasion, that need to communicate complex ideas about Taiwan's history, society and political situation as a country with the world has never been more urgent. 

But that's not going to happen as long as the language classes students take are oriented towards a series of tests that don't assess that kind of communicative competence. If you want learners to acquire certain skills and knowledge, the assessments the undertake should test what you want them to acquire.

The problem isn't the schools. It's not the parents, or the students. It's not the teachers. It's not "culture" or "society". It's not "traditional" or "Confucian" views of education or insufficient teacher training (though it's true that university teachers don't generally receive much, and that should be addressed). It's not even Bilingual by 2030 or the Ministry of Education. They all exhibit symptoms but they are not the disease.

It's the test. The test is the tumor. 

If the government isn't willing to tackle this, then the tumor will continue to metastasize as we waste time treating symptoms, while telling ourselves that the symptoms are the disease. Then we'll wonder why our organs keep failing.

Revisiting the "Bilingual By 2030" plan: a note of cautious optimism

Since President Tsai’s 2nd term began, there has been renewed talk from the government and media interest in the “Bilingual by 2030” program introduced in her last term.

Some of what has been said recently is promising: 

"The younger generation of Taiwanese need to learn how to clearly explain to the international community what kind of country Taiwan is, as well as its core values and its people," the president said. 

She said one major problem of Taiwan's current English teaching is that schools focus more on teaching vocabulary and grammar. 

"We need to provide a comprehensive English learning environment so that speaking English becomes a very natural thing in the country" she said, adding that this will be a major challenge for the government over the next 10 years.

The program follows the same general principles of the “bilingual” English program created in Tainan City under then-mayor (and now Vice President) William Lai. 

I wanted to discuss the various elements of this policy, how they’re being approached on a few different levels, and what the issues are likely to be. I’ve written about this before, but that was back when the plan had just been announced, and nobody was really sure what to say about it, myself included.

Some of my concerns have since been addressed. Others remain, not all of which I'll discuss here. Generally, however, I'm more cautiously optimistic than I was before.

What is the program, exactly?

The first concern is the term “bilingual” - it’s confusing in a Taiwanese context, because Taiwan is already multilingual, so it would have been smarter on the part of the government to call it “Multilingual by 2030”. Thanks to the clunky title, there is a common belief that the goal of this program is to make every Taiwanese citizen fluent in English by 2030. That’s simply not the case. 

The endgame is better as improving the overall level of English proficiency in Taiwan (which is not the same as “making everybody fluent in English”) and making business and government affairs more internationally versatile - a Taiwanese populace that can go out into the world with the language skills they need to study, work or simply talk about Taiwan (or anything else) with foreigners, and a country that is accessible to international business. 

“Proficiency” has many levels, however. Nobody thinks every Taiwanese citizen will suddenly become fluent in English. Even in highly English-proficient societies like Hong Kong and Singapore, actual ability varies quite a bit between individuals. That’s normal. 

Another concern is that the program will simply involve more English class hours in school, which will necessitate importing large numbers of foreign teachers to teach these classes. I don’t know the exact plan for the number of dedicated English instruction hours, but I can say that one big push of the 2030 program is to increase CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) instruction: to teach some non-language classes (such as math, science and history) in English, not necessarily increase dedicated language class hours. This is good, as one basic tenet of language acquisition is that input and interaction in a variety of authentic situations and environments brings about fluency - for example, taking classes in other subjects in that language - moreso than direct language instruction.

One issue with this plan is that there may not be a large enough pool of local teachers who are willing to teach these classes in English, and I’ve already heard of reports of pressure from school administrators on teachers who don’t necessarily want to agree to this, but are being pushed to do so anyway. 

If it actually works, however, CLIL-based instruction has the potential to accomplish what more hours of traditional language instruction could never do. It’s one reason why English proficiency remains strong in former British colonies across Asia: they tend to offer English-medium instruction.

Generally speaking, the more people are informed about the program, or the more involved they are in it, the more optimistic they are about it. That’s a good sign. A lot of ‘involved’ people I know say that it’s a solid idea without a fully-fleshed-out game plan, and how successful it will be depends on how well it’s implemented. It could end up being successful far beyond most people’s modest expectations, or yet another performative act in the country’s repeated attempts to “internationalize”.

The colonial history of English in Asia, and why Taiwan is different

Of course, Taiwan is not a former colony of any English-speaking power. That means it lacks the English “advantage”, but also that English in Taiwan is not necessarily mired in post-colonial discourse. It’s important to remember that in those former colonies, access to English was given primarily to local elites as a way of ‘bringing them into the fold’ - that is, ensuring their loyalty to and even desire to imitate their British colonial masters. For everyone else, the British actually pushed local-language instruction. They framed it as respecting local cultures and customs (at least, one person writing about Hong Kong put it that way, even invoking “Confucian values” long before that term became a drinking-game level cliche), but in another sense, it was blatantly about ensuring that non-elites would not start getting ambitions beyond what the British wanted of them: to remain manual laborers whose efforts enriched the empire.   

If all that makes you feel squicked out - it should. 

What Taiwan seems to be attempting to do is compete with these former colonial nations (yes, I treat Hong Kong as a nation) in terms of English proficiency, without the colonial baggage it came with. I honestly cannot think of another example where that has been successfully done. 

The good news is that this freedom from an English-speaking colonial history means that the English education in Taiwan can be discussed in terms of its utility for Taiwan domestically and in terms of international communication. 

The real key: local talent

This would also not necessitate the mass import of foreign teachers of dubious quality (I’ll get to the quality of instruction later). It would not even require bringing in many teacher trainers to train up locals. 

Instead, the hope is that the country will tap its domestic language teaching talent - the best and most qualified Taiwanese teachers - who can be trained up and mentored to become teacher trainers themselves. The “foreigners” - which includes foreign teacher trainers already based in Taiwan - would at that point take on more of a support and mentorship role. There could be some outside help and possibly new teachers hired from abroad, but mostly the plain is not to kick current teachers out in favor of a bunch of foreigners. Instead, it’s to create a robust CoP (community of practice, in which experienced teachers with training skills induct more junior or novice teachers into the profession) that is self-sufficient and self-renewing from within Taiwan. 

There are other initiatives - translating government documents and websites, ensuring that travel and business information and basic services are available in English - I’m less qualified to speak on those plans. I do hope the government realizes that there is already a strong base of Taiwan-based editors and translators - both local and foreign - who could potentially do a good job with this if they were properly recruited and incentivized. 

Addressing Concerns: Local and minority languages

There are concerns that focusing on English will damage the status of local and Indigenous/minority languages (some of these criticisms are clearly partisan attacks - ignore those - but not all are). This is an issue, but I don’t think it’s as dire as some are predicting. First of all, there’s a lot of intersectionality in those local languages. Taiwanese is generally considered one, but we can’t exactly call it a ‘minority language’, can we? Outside of northern Taiwan, it’s not. And Taiwanese - suppressed for so long by Mandarin - has also played an oppressor role against Hakka and all of the Indigenous languages. 

I do think if we’re going to talk about English as the potential oppressor of these languages, that we first need to grapple with the damage that was intentionally done to them by Mandarin (and perhaps less intentionally, but still just as damagingly, by Taiwanese). This is where a ‘multilingual’ rather than ‘bilingual’ perspective would be helpful. 

The thing is, these local languages tend to be community-learnt. Attempts to turn local and Indigenous languages into ‘school subjects’ have not generally been successful - if my reading is correct, that’s true around the world. They tend to flourish when their widespread daily use is promoted in communities, supported by a variety of media that users of those languages can consume.

The question is, what do these speech communities want in terms of promotion and support of their own languages in Taiwan? Has anybody asked them? (I’m guessing not.) What kind of funding might they want, and how might it be used? The government would have done well if, while turning its eye to English, it had also focused on building multilingual initiatives - asking these various communities in Taiwan what sort of support they would like, and then providing it. Not every family teaches their children the language of their ancestors, and whatever support they might want in changing that pattern, where it exists, is vital and should not be pushed aside in favor of a sole focus on English. 

English, unlike local languages in Taiwan, will probably not be learnable in a ‘community’ setting such as this for quite some time, if ever. From that perspective, the plan to increase exposure to and use of English won’t necessarily be taking much away from local languages - they would occupy two different spaces, and already do. Tsai has said that one goal of this “Bilingual by 2030” plan is to equip Taiwanese with the ability to tell Taiwan’s story to the world, which is a laudable goal. English - a second language - would be a language for looking out into the world, and welcoming the world to Taiwan. Local languages would exist for living within Taiwan, and maintaining local knowledge and heritage.

That’s not to say that local languages can never have a place in schools in Taiwan. But, it will be hard enough to get local teachers ready to teach non-language subjects in English. How difficult will it be to find teachers who can teach math, geography, health or other subjects in Taiwanese, or Hakka, or Atayal, or Rukai, or Amis? I certainly think it would be a worthwhile effort, but I would not expect immediate results. 

The dividing lines of English

As English seems to always bring class divides with it, there's a concern that middle class and wealthy urban Taiwanese will benefit more and deepen inequality. One can see signs of this already among the children of the upper middle class and wealthy, who are more likely to grow up around English, have family members who speak it fluently, often studying abroad themselves. In a sense, it echoes the way English was brought to Asia originally. Just remember that the same used to be true for Mandarin in Taiwan.

That is a real concern to be addressed if we want to break down these barriers. If a robust CoP is created that has Taiwanese teachers training their junior colleagues, rather than bringing in foreigners to train up locals, then that knowledge will be more easily disseminated to smaller communities and schools with fewer resources. I’d also suggest making education resources more equal across the country, obviously. 

It is quite unreasonable to expect a kid from a more marginalized community to grow up in Mandarin, and then pick up several second languages (English plus Taiwanese, or Hakka, or an Indigenous language). It’s more reasonable to work towards a society where both Mandarin and local languages are learned as mother tongues within various communities, with some education support available in ways requested by those communities for non-Mandarin languages (Mandarin has been so wholly foisted on Taiwan that it hardly needs any support), and English is more robustly taught as a second language. 

In fact, I’ve met more than one person in Taiwan who prefers to communicate in their local language (usually, but not always, Taiwanese), will choose English as their next preference, and will avoid Mandarin if at all possible. That means there is an opportunity for English to push back against Mandarin language imperialism in Taiwan, if people decide to use it that way.

The demand side

Some have spoken of the need to create ‘demand’ for English, not just spending money creating supply of instruction. I’m less worried about this - the demand is there, if we can connect it to learners’ actual motivations. There are teachers in Taiwan who reluctantly admit that many students see English merely as an academic subject, and study it simply to get a test score and further their education. But, leaving aside the massive amount of English-language media that many Taiwanese do consume and express a wish to better understand, there’s the fact that most regional business (not just global business - I mean across Asia) is conducted in English. As much as China might like it to be otherwise, English, not Mandarin, is the language of regional communication in Asia. 

Are Taiwanese youth interested in communicating with people from other Asian countries? Do BTS fans want to connect with each other even though they don’t all speak Korean? Are politically-minded youth interested in the meme-heavy Milk Tea Alliance or its slightly stodgier, more clearly political Network of Young Democratic Asians? Are they interested in working or studying abroad, or working in Taiwan for an international company?

Yes, many of them probably do. 

The demand is there, and it’s not always a function of linguistic imperialism, where the periphery is trying to imitate some sort of White, Western center. We just need to connect it to how we deliver the supply.

Institutional constraints: testing

That’s where my own concerns come in. The research is clear that Taiwanese teachers in general are aware of more communication-based teaching methods, and in fact there is a strong (though not universal) desire to use them. (I've read this research but need to get a dissertation draft in - I'll link it when I have time). 

Elementary school teachers report the highest feeling of freedom to teach their learners in communicative ways. At higher grades, however, the washback from the testing system causes teachers to feel they need to focus more on preparing learners for major exams.

In short, a large number of teachers in Taiwan want to do more with language education, but feel constrained by tests that simply do not reflect actual language knowledge. (I’ve seen some of the tests. In some cases the expected answers are actually inaccurate, or only one answer is accepted when more than one answer is possible.) 

If everyone wants to move away from focusing mostly on “grammar and vocabulary” and towards communication,  then the biggest obstacle holding them back is the exam framework. At least for foreign language education, it simply has to go. If there has to be an English requirement for school admission at all, require an international proficiency exam score (the cost of this should be subsidized for students from lower-income families) or simply have an oral interview. 

And yet the exam framework is the one thing nobody is discussing doing away with.

More institutional constraints: language teaching qualifications

My other concern is the language teachers that the government is hoping to bring in from other countries. As it stands now, one can get some teaching jobs in Taiwan with just a substitute teacher’s license, which can be obtained with little or no experience and minimal training in some places. However, reputable and internationally-recognized language teacher training programs - such as the CELTA, CertTESOL, CELT-P, CELT-S, TYLEC and more (there are others, including higher level training programs) - are generally not recognized. 

Part-time postgraduate programs like mine, which is face-to-face but takes place over several years, are also generally not recognized. There’s no reason at all for this, as part-time programs deliver the same content as full-time ones.

There has been talk of Taiwan creating its own language teacher training program, which feels unnecessary as there are so many good ones already available. But without recognizing the programs which already exist, there is no clear existing local framework to assess the quality of these new hires.

When assessing teacher training programs, it’s not difficult to figure out which ones deserve recognition. We don’t have to officially sanction shoddy weekend or online TEFL certifications.  Stipulate a minimum number of practicum hours that candidates must teach and pass - let’s say, 6 - and you’ll have weeded out all the scams and be left with more reputable courses. 

And yet, there is not nearly enough discussion of changing this paradigm. 

Along with that, it would be smart for the government to officially pivot away from native speakerist policies that privilege inexperienced Westerners from a handful of countries over qualified teachers from around the world, which could bring a diversity of knowledge and intercultural awareness to Taiwan. In fact, improving intercultural awareness might be the biggest benefit of Bilingual By 2030. We also need to do away with nonsensical laws:

What’s odd about this rule is that English is not an official language of the US, UK or Australia - which have no official languages. And yet, you can get a language teaching job if you are from any one of them. Guess where English is an official language - places like Nigeria, the Philippines, India and Singapore. And yet you don’t see schools or the government rushing to hire teachers from these places, either. 

Finally, I have grave concerns about the buxiban system, which I won’t go into here - we all know what the problems are. Buxibans could be a force for good in making English more widely accessible as a tool for communication, but not as they currently exist. Parents, however, often have no clear way of assessing which buxibans attempt to provide quality language learning, and which are overpriced daycare centers. I would like to see that change. 

Cautious Optimism

I’m more optimistic than many about Bilingual by 2030. 

While not all Taiwanese will become ‘fluent’ or even highly proficient in English, nobody is expecting them to. Those who do use their English skills to go out in the world and introduce Taiwan to the international community - whether directly through activism or indirectly as simply Taiwanese citizens living abroad or working with foreigners - will be worth all of this effort. 

If implemented soundly, it has the potential to make Taiwan more interculturally aware - imagine a Taiwan where blackface videos aren’t considered comedy! - without necessarily impinging on or damaging local cultures and speech communities. If the right trainers are found to participate in a robust local community of practice in which Taiwanese teachers take the lead, more teaching qualifications are recognized, a CLIL program is successfully implemented after sufficient (and ongoing) training and support, and the English examination system is completely dismantled, Taiwan might successfully do what few countries have managed: gain the benefits of an English-proficient society without the colonial baggage. 

The fact is that Taiwan can’t isolate itself. Certainly local languages certainly matter and deserve support and attention to the same extent as English, but while Taiwan can’t only look outward, it can’t navel-gaze either. If Taiwan wants to see the world on its terms and maintain its sovereignty in the face of a screeching, frothy-mouthed, annexationist neighbor, it has to get those messages out to the world. Like it or not, as of now the way to do that is better English education which focuses on English as a communicative tool rather than a purely academic subject.

Honestly, it is possible to do both: to promote local cultures and support local speech communities, and support greater internationalization. I honestly think the two are only mutually exclusive in the minds of people with their own agendas.

Generally, I believe that the government understands this. They get the big picture. They see why it’s important and what the endgame should look like.

I do worry that some of the details are being overlooked, some of which - like the complete unsuitability of the exam system and the lackadaisical, uninformed way qualifications are often evaluated - might be exactly the details that bring the whole thing down. I worry that a focus on bilingualism rather than multilingualism will turn out to be a liability. 

But, there is still time to do this right.