As more countries, concerned about academic interference, begin to close down the China-facilitated Confucius Institutes on their university campuses, Taiwan is in a unique position to fill the gap by exporting its Chinese-language teaching expertise and drawing more students to the island for language study. At the end of 2020, then American Institute in Taiwan…
Ban on Official Use of Zoom The Executive Yuan in April made Taiwan one of the first countries to prohibit use of popular videoconferencing software Zoom for official government communication. In many government agencies, officials are increasingly working from home owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, but they will no longer be allowed to use the…
When I arrived in Tainan in the summer of 1991, not even the city’s main roads had bilingual signs. As an English tutor, I had to visit households in different neighborhoods, and thus quickly had to learn how to read Chinese addresses. A few years later, romanization began to appear at major intersections. More recently,…
The promotion of English proficiency is designed to increase competitiveness in the international arena. To help ensure this country’s continued competitiveness in an era of globalization, the National Development Council (NDC) last December launched a plan to develop Taiwan into a “bilingual nation” by 2030. The goal is not to establish English as an official…
Demand for English classroom courses remains strong. But student numbers are dwindling amid a low birth rate, weak economy, and the challenge from e-learning. In the mid-2000s, Taiwan still had a faint flavor of the Wild Wild East. Parties in nightclubs lasted well past sunrise, and revelers often spilled out onto the street. Complaints about…
A long-stalled cooperative educational program may have a new lease on life. For years, AmCham Taipei has emphasized the potential value for Taiwan of allowing – in fact, encouraging – prestigious foreign universities and other educational institutions to set up degree and/or non-degree programs in this country as they have done elsewhere across the region…
“History-writing is a way of getting rid of the past,” the German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once said. Not in Taiwan, though, where a complicated past continues to intrude on the politics of the present, as witnessed in last summer’s student protests against proposed changes to the high school history curriculum. The Ministry of…
Senior high-school students opposed to the allegedly “China-centric” new curriculum guidelines developed by the Ministry of Education (MOE), as well as the non-transparent way that the guidelines were established, have staged a series of rallies and protests. On July 23, a late night attempt by protestors to storm the MOE headquarters was met with resistance…
