Bilingual education has been introduced in the Taiwan area as a way of reversing the previous neglect of Chinese dialects other than Mandarin. The central government has been lagging behind several steps in its proponents for bilingual education; thus, the magistrates of three counties, making good on campaign promises, chose to "jump the gun" and institute programs in the areas under their jurisdiction prior to any decision by the central authorities.
Ilan County was the first to initiate Southern Fujianese courses in elementary and junior high schools. The program was heralded by a county order in June 1990 that students should no longer be discouraged from or punished for speaking dialects at school. Pingtung County followed suit in September 1991, and elective courses in Southern Fujianese, Hakka, and the Paiwan and Rukai aboriginal languages are now taught in selected county schools. Additional activities, such as speech and singing contests, have also been held to further motivate students. These events led to the production of a full multicultural program of music and dance which was performed islandwide.
Extracurricular Atayal language lessons made their debut in 1990 at Taipei County's Wulai elementary and junior high schools, where the majority of students are Atayal aborigines. In the absence of ready-made teaching materials, teachers depended almost solely on a blackboard and their own ingenuity. Some were not very fluent in their ancestral language, and had to learn it themselves as they went along. Materials were compiled as courses were developed. In 1992, the Taipei County Government commissioned its Bureau of Education and the Taipei County Cultural Center to compile teaching materials for the two most prevalent Chinese dialects in Taiwan, Southern Fujianese and Hakka, and two aboriginal languages, Ami and Atayal. The center was also asked to publish a county periodical on bilingual education; sponsor community and campus activities; establish a teacher consultation center; and conduct teacher training programs, teaching workshops and romanization contests. Textbooks compiled by linguistic specialists include content concerning the geography, history, famous people, religion, and arts of Taiwan.
However, the promotion of bilingual education by local governments has faced many obstacles. One of the obstacles comes from parents who do not support bilingual instruction programs. Some parents worry that instruction time spent gaining competence in a chosen Chinese dialect or aboriginal language might negatively affect a student's ability to compose in standard written Chinese, and possibly result in lower scores on college entrance exams. Other parents feel that the usefulness of their native language is limited. "Wouldn't it be better to teach English or Japanese instead?" they reason. For aborigines who are less well off, economic and social advancement is a much more urgent concern; bilingual education may be a luxury that they feel they cannot afford.
To remedy the situation, the MOE revised guidelines and amended curriculum standards for elementary and junior high schools. Starting in September 2001, primary school students will be required to take at least one course on a local language, such as Southern Fujianese, Hakka, or an aboriginal language. For junior high school students, however, such language courses will remain an elective. Furthermore, the revised guidelines clearly stipulate that schools may teach in dialects. The government supports such courses with various levels of funding for compiling teaching materials, publishing teacher handbooks, holding teacher workshops, producing audio and video cassettes, and collecting teaching materials.
Another obstacle is the absence of generally agreed-upon standard written forms for each of the Chinese dialects and aboriginal languages. Different phonetic systems have been proposed and tried. The choices for representing aboriginal languages in the written content of textbooks range from a number of romanization schemes to a phonetic symbol-based system similar to that for Mandarin. For Southern Fujianese and Hakka, the use of Chinese characters with no phonetic alphabet is a third option. However, simply using standard Chinese characters is problematic, since they may only indirectly indicate pronunciation, and some dialects lack widely known, written characters for some of their words.
Mandarin Phonetic Symbols have sometimes been adapted to represent Chinese dialects and aboriginal languages. But because MPS is a part-alphabet, part-syllabary system created primarily for the language's relatively simple phonological and tonal structure, they are not particularly well-adapted for use with other dialects. This is especially true with multisyllabic Austronesian languages like Taiwan's aboriginal tongues.
Romanization systems are perhaps the most flexible and precise and are well suited to serve as the primary writing system for aboriginal languages. In addition, they can serve as an auxiliary system for teaching Chinese dialects. For example, the romanization system developed by missionaries for Southern Fujianese has a long history and is currently in widespread use, so it would seem a natural candidate as a standard phonetic alphabet. As things stand, each method tends to start from scratch and contribute yet another idiosyncratic system to the existing jumble. Thus, progress is often held back simply due to indecision about which system to adopt in education. Nonetheless, a new system must be decided to accommodate both localization and globalization.
In August 1994, the MOE established a task force, composed of experts from the Institute of History and Philology of Academia Sinica, to research dialects and aboriginal languages and establish guidelines for teaching them. A guidebook of auxiliary teaching materials for dialects in junior and senior high schools which proposed a Taiwan language phonetic system was published by the task force in March 1995. The project also involves developing materials for aboriginal languages, including Atayal, Ami, Paiwan, Rukai, Puyuma, Tsou, Bunun, Saisiyat and Kavalan. Moreover, the Legislative Yuan passed the Aboriginal Education Act ¬in 1998, which stipulates that the government should provide aborigines with opportunities to learn their native languages, history and culture at preschools and elementary schools in their hometowns.
In January 1998, the MOE promulgated the Taiwan language phonetic system after some moderate changes were made in line with the romanization system developed by missionaries. Since then, official phonetic systems for Southern Fujianese and Hakka as well as phonetic symbols for aboriginal languages in Taiwan have been established. However, the adoption of this system is not compulsory. Academic or private sector groups are free to develop their own phonetic systems for dialect materials. The first official Min-nan Yu Dictionary was published in 2000 to assist with the implementation of Southern Fujianese courses in schools. It consists of Chinese characters and the Phonetic System for Taiwan's Min-nan Dialect developed by the MOE. The pronunciation is based on the widely used Tainan accent. The Taipei City Bureau of Education published the first set of official Southern Fujianese textbooks for kindergarten students in January 2000. Other teaching materials include posters, CDs, videos and various teaching aids. In May 2000, a series of aboriginal language textbooks were also published by an independent publishing house.
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