English to shine
The American Chamber of Commerce in Taiwan recently released its “2024 Business Climate Survey.” About 85 percent of its members were optimistic about Taiwan’s economic outlook for the next three years and it said that jobseekers generally possess qualities that make Taiwanese more competitive in the international market
Among these qualities, the top five in order were: diligence, reliability, execution, commitment and teamwork.
As for the most obvious weaknesses of Taiwan’s human resources, international mindset topped the list, followed by poor English-language skills.
This is absolutely true, as the two weaknesses are linked by a causal relationship.
English is an international language. If a person’s English proficiency is low, they would naturally face obstacles to acquiring global information and connecting to the world.
Given the foundation of the bilingual education policy of President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) administration and its implementation over the past eight years, president-elect William Lai (賴清德) should continue to push the policy boldly once he takes office in May to maintain the bold progress.
Not long ago, the Ministry of National Defense repeatedly sent nationwide emergency alert messages to all citizens’ cellphones. In addition to the mistranslation of “satellite” as “missile,” there were at least three grammatical errors in a short message with only nine English words, which was absurd in the extreme.
English-language training courses — whether they be long or short-term — as well as talent trained or employed by the ministry or the three branches of the armed forces are clearly far short of expectation.
Despite Taiwan boasting the world’s highest rate of master’s theses and doctoral dissertations, the rate of academic plagiarism is high, which might also be linked to the problem of poor English ability.
Previous generations of Taiwanese worked extremely hard to create an economic miracle. Given the development of the Internet as a global conduit and store of information, as well as the emergence of competitor nations, it is absolutely necessary for Taiwanese to improve their English skills.
That would open more doors to the international community, and allow Taiwan and talented Taiwanese to shine more brightly on the world stage.
Fang Fu-chuan
Taipei
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