The Ministry of Education and National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) on Tuesday last week inaugurated the Office of Global Mandarin Education, with officials saying that they hope to devise strategies and integrate resources to promote the nation as a top destination for foreigners who want to learn the Chinese language.
NTNU president Chang Kuo-en (張國恩) said that when the university founded its Mandarin Training Center in 1956, the institute had only five students, but now about 6,000 students study Chinese at NTNU every year.
About one-third of the students who graduated from the Department of Chinese as a Second Language and the Department of Applied Chinese Language and Culture pursued a career as Chinese teachers at foreign institutions, he added.
With the help of the advisers who the ministry recruited from academia and business, the office is aimed at pooling resources from different sectors of society to promote the nation’s Mandarin education sector, he said.
The office will supply Mandarin teachers to ASEAN members in accordance with the government’s “new southbound policy,” while having a global focus when promoting the nation as a Mandarin-
teaching hub, the ministry’s Department of International and Cross-strait Education Director-General Yang Ming-ling (楊敏玲) said.
Through the joint efforts of NTNU and the ministry, 111 Mandarin teachers were dispatched to 16 nations to teach traditional Chinese, and many of them have built promising careers due to their outstanding work, Yang said.
One of the office’s missions is to identify foreigners’ needs learning Chinese and devise strategies and create teaching methods, she said.
As about half the foreign students studying at NTNU pursue further education after graduating from Chinese programs, 45 universities nationwide have set up language learning centers, which play a pivotal role in the ministry’s initiative to increase the number of foreign students who obtain Taiwanese diplomas, she said.
Responding to media queries about how the nation would respond to competition from China in the field of Chinese education, given the international prevalence of Confucius Institute branches set up by the Chinese government to promote Chinese education, NTNU vice president Sung Yao-ting (宋曜廷) said that even though China has spent profusely on sending teachers abroad to teach Chinese, Taiwan outperforms China with its animated teaching materials.
Sung said the most common criticism about the institute is that its teaching materials are laced with dogmas and that its teaching methods lack ingenuity.
With the help of the Internet, students who sign up for Chinese learning or graduate programs can obtain their diplomas online, he said.
Another edge Taiwan has over China is its technology-driven classes, Sung said, citing NTNU’s Smart Pinyin system, which automatically detects problems with foreign students’ intonation and corrects them.
“I think we have a pretty good chance [against China],” Sung said.
TRAGEDY: An expert said that the incident was uncommon as the chance of a ground crew member being sucked into an IDF engine was ‘minuscule’ A master sergeant yesterday morning died after she was sucked into an engine during a routine inspection of a fighter jet at an air base in Taichung, the Air Force Command Headquarters said. The officer, surnamed Hu (胡), was conducting final landing checks at Ching Chuan Kang (清泉崗) Air Base when she was pulled into the jet’s engine for unknown reasons, the air force said in a news release. She was transported to a hospital for emergency treatment, but could not be revived, it said. The air force expressed its deepest sympathies over the incident, and vowed to work with authorities as they
A tourist who was struck and injured by a train in a scenic area of New Taipei City’s Pingsi District (平溪) on Monday might be fined for trespassing on the tracks, the Railway Police Bureau said yesterday. The New Taipei City Fire Department said it received a call at 4:37pm on Monday about an incident in Shifen (十分), a tourist destination on the Pingsi Railway Line. After arriving on the scene, paramedics treated a woman in her 30s for a 3cm to 5cm laceration on her head, the department said. She was taken to a hospital in Keelung, it said. Surveillance footage from a
BITTERLY COLD: The inauguration ceremony for US president-elect Donald Trump has been moved indoors due to cold weather, with the new venue lacking capacity A delegation of cross-party lawmakers from Taiwan, led by Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), for the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump, would not be able to attend the ceremony, as it is being moved indoors due to forecasts of intense cold weather in Washington tomorrow. The inauguration ceremony for Trump and US vice president-elect JD Vance is to be held inside the Capitol Rotunda, which has a capacity of about 2,000 people. A person familiar with the issue yesterday said although the outdoor inauguration ceremony has been relocated, Taiwan’s legislative delegation has decided to head off to Washington as scheduled. The delegation
Another wave of cold air would affect Taiwan starting from Friday and could evolve into a continental cold mass, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Temperatures could drop below 10°C across Taiwan on Monday and Tuesday next week, CWA forecaster Chang Chun-yao (張竣堯) said. Seasonal northeasterly winds could bring rain, he said. Meanwhile, due to the continental cold mass and radiative cooling, it would be cold in northern and northeastern Taiwan today and tomorrow, according to the CWA. From last night to this morning, temperatures could drop below 10°C in northern Taiwan, it said. A thin coat of snow
RSS