Speaker
Description
Educational institutions in Taiwan, from tertiary to pre-school, are currently under immense pressure to reform their English programs in response to the government's "Bilingual Nation 2030" policy. Based on the survey of policy documents as well as voices and practices on the ground, this presentation argues that for a multilingual nation like Taiwan to consider turning itself "bilingual," the stakeholders must consider it pseudo-monolingual in the first place in spite of the government's celebration of its diverse linguistic heritage. This presentation then posits that this may be related to the fact that all officially mandated linguae francae through Taiwan's history have been external languages, and that English is no different in this respect. It goes on to point out that the discrepancies in the implementation of the policy: the main approaches include: Supplanting Mandarin with English as the medium of instruction (EMI); incorporating English language teaching into the content-based classes (CLIL); and maintaining the status quo except some low-stake interactions conducted in English as an auxiliary language (Mandarin+). The future direction of the policy will depend on the ebb and flow of the politics of Taiwan identity.
