I am disregarding international curricula that don’t satisfy MOE standards. My understanding is that in a bilingual curriculum, all subjects are taught in both Chinese and English (maybe except Chinese‐subject and Social Studies). Compared to the traditional, monolingual curriculum, doesn’t that mean students have almost twice the amount of workload? Or is workload about half in every course in a bilingual curriculum than in a monolingual curriculum?
I am especially curious about the bilingual schools that claim their curriculum is dual Taiwanese and American, for example the Korrnell schools in Hsinchu County and Taichung. How are students there not worked to death going through two countries’ worth of education at the same time? In fact how are their classes ending at 5pm (excluding extracurriculars) as opposed to say 10pm? I am bewildered how these schools are fitting so much stuff into nominally an 8‐to‐5 schedule. What are students’ weekly class schedules like there? Could you transfer a student out to either a Taiwanese or an American school and they actually will do well either way?
I am asking as someone who is not a prospective applicant, just a rando curious about today’s educational landscape. Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
From what I’ve seen in the so-called “bilingual” public schools in Taiwan, yes, it means twice the work (though I know nothing about the school you linked to.) While most elementary school kids have a few half days each week that slowly dwindles down to one (Wednesdays) by sixth grade, many of the so-called “bilingual” public schools have full days every day except Wednesday, starting in first grade. They usually have parallel/doubled up classes – 社會 might be taught in Chinese as a full/standard/MOE approved number of classes and then there will be a full separate “society” class wherein that or similar content is then covered in English. PE and art are generally clown shows with a foreigner that did not know they would be expected to teach these classes getting dropped in and expected to teach those classes. Math, for some really weird reason (dude, they’re numbers? Teach them to count and do simple math when that’s all they’re doing in their L1 anyway???), does not seem to be at the top of the priority list for subjects that get taught in English. Some of the English lit textbooks that some of these schools are using are embarrassing. The admin and local English teachers will say “yes, our students understand these texts! Aren’t our kids brilliant?!” but all you need to do is point to a random high frequency word on any page and ask even a high performing student what it means and they will let you know that they have no flipping clue. “We acquire language that we understand” ~a famous stupid linguist in the 1970s that gets quoted too often for a theory he never bothered to actually try and prove
I would not be exaggerating to say that 100% of the schools here that are trying to implement “bilingual” curriculums are making everything up as they go along. Public and private, they are all the same. When you see success stories, it is ALWAYS because the schools handpicked the students based on family backgrounds. It is inhumane how many local neighborhood kids get shoved aside in the public “bilingual” schools and are literally left to fail because the school determined that those kids “are really poor at English” before they even had an English class. Even the public schools only make an effort with the kids who arrived on day one with a high level of fluency in both English and Chinese. Where, pray tell, did they learn those languages? Hint: not at the “bilingual” school!
The pressure on the parents to do most of the teaching at home or hire a private tutor is very high at these schools in Taiwan. To be honest, it is a fully expected part of sending a child to one of these schools. While I have read case studies about public schools in less than wealthy areas that service the local population in the US doing amazing things with language immersion, Taiwan is not doing that. The public schools that successfully have immersion and bilingual programs in the US assume the parents do not speak the target language. The teachers are actually trained to teach the children in ways that work for language acquisition. The kids go to school from 8am-3pm and they learn the target languages there. In Taiwan, it’s the opposite. For private schools, if the kids are let in without high fluency in English, it’s always done under the condition that the family do the work of improving their child’s fluency outside of school. (Ironically, if the kids are already English speakers but do not speak Chinese, the schools really like that and don’t want that to change, as that means there are more English-speakers in the room, which makes the local parents very happy. Yes, it leads to all sorts of social problems when there are people, whether that’s staff or students, at a bilingual school that don’t speak both languages).
It is also mind-blowing how much homework some of these schools give. There was one school where the kids were required to read in both English and Chinese for at least 15 minutes a day (that’s 30 minutes of reading. For a SEVEN YEAR OLD) and then fill out a form (like, multiple sentences of writing) about what they read every day. In both languages. And then they still had math homework on top of that. We’re talking about kids who can barely hold a freaking pencil or sound out simple words/recognize basic characters. Who succeeds in these schools? The kids with parents that don’t need to work for a living AND can invest time and energy into spending at least an hour (if not much more) every night on homework in two languages. Oh yeah, and the parents would obviously need to know both languages. Who fails in these schools? Anyone who doesn’t come from a super family.
ehhh… I know a lot of families that pulled their kids from private “bilingual”/“dual immersion”/“international” (all these terms are used interchangeably by owners who don’t know what any of the words actually mean) schools and sent them to local (non-bilingual) elementary schools. The kids tended to struggle at first because they didn’t learn much of anything at those schools (again, the responsibly of actually education the children fell on the parents, not the school). It didn’t really have much to do with the language of instruction…
Anyway, I have a lot of opinions on this issue, as Taiwan’s bilingual efforts are an absolute train wreck that is really trying to make sure the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The government, private schools, etc. literally are making zero effort to actually assess the success of their programs. Success, to everyone in power, is if some people do well on English assessments that don’t even assess English communication skills. I have yet to see any concrete form of assessment come out for the Bilingual 2030 Plan. Basically, it’s just “declare that everyone is bilingual now because it’s 2030”. It’s an embarrassment.
Not quite. Basically the activities need to be the same with just some everyday English words included. The time spent on activity cannot be longer just because it is “bilingual.”
From my understanding they are not quite bilingual in the same sense as the MOE wants. Instead those schools you mentioned teach certain classes in full English.
Thanks. It seems you have had experience with bilingual schools here, both public and private? Do you see a high drop‐out or transfer‐out rate at these places? If so how are the parents making sense of that? Like do they not see a problem with the school’s curriculum? Also don’t public schools have to accept kids who live in their school district? Thanks.
Does this contradict with nz’s experience, or do you by “activity” mean like the classes themselves aren’t much different from a monolingual class besides some usage of English, but homework definitely could be twice the amount? Because I was imagining classes being like this week we do Chapter 2 in Chinese then all over again in English; and then a homework assignment would be say a problem set Chinese plus another problem set in English, both equal in weight, the Chinese one being what a monolingual program would give out as one assignment.
So I actually wasn’t 100% sure, but is “bilingual” indeed a regulated appellation? Like a school has to satisfy a set of standards to call themselves that, and if they don’t then that’d be illegal, correct?
Yeah I saw that. Quite upsetting. Yet it seems parents keep sending kids there so somehow the scandal barely tarnished their name. What are the reputations of their G1–9 schools like?
I don’t mean to focus on the Korrnell G1–9 schools exclusively, but are you able to help shed light on how in the world they are able to both satisfy MOE standards (since they are bilingual but not international) and adapt Common Core standards (that’s what they say on their websites, though they don’t seem to be ACS WASC accredited or anything like that or else they’d tout that, so it’s not clear how they can back up their claims)? That sounds like a tall order, like it sounds like making students go to two “full” schools at the same time. Or maybe it just doesn’t take much to satisfy either the minimum set of requirements set out by MOE or that in Common Core. I am looking at the Korrnell Ritz set of syllabi and it’s not clear where the American stuff even is.
I used to be a kid in Taiwan. As long as I got good grades and didn’t get into trouble I was left alone. From what I see fewer and fewer kids have this luxury.
It was and it still seems to be. Math and physics were alright but Chinese and the social studies required truly massive amounts of rote memorization.
Paradoxically it was when I got into university in the U.S. and started needing to stay up until 4AM instead of 12 – in response to way higher academic pressure than I ever faced before – that I realized I learned too slowly back in Taiwan.
I did a few all nighters at UT Austin too, their geology courses has a huge amount of rote memorization too. Math and physics are way easier. I even considered changing my major to physics (or at least geophysics).
But those all nighters have proven to not work, and they didn’t work.
Public schools have to accept everyone in their area but that doesn’t mean they have to educate them equally. By law they should, but they don’t. By that, I mean the teachers and admin label the students before they even enter first grade. Anyone who doesn’t already speak fluent English (or seems to be “behind” in any academic subject) gets shoved aside and left to fail for the remainder of their academic life. That’s not just at the bilingual schools, but when the public school declares itself “bilingual”, it’s a huge problem for the kids who aren’t already bilingual. These are overwhelmingly children with parents who do not have the resources to invest in their child, either because of their work, finances, or because they themselves did not receive enough of an education that they can help their child. It is a very apparent generational problem and schools do everything they can to not break that terrible cycle. Within the public bilingual schools, you really have two schools: one where all the resources are poured into the kids who were already ahead when they got there to make them be even further ahead and one where significantly fewer resources are kind of applied to the kids who were labeled “failures” before they had a chance to even try. I’ve seen this trend in every public school I’ve worked at and every FET I’ve talked to about this who’s been around for more than a few months has noted the same issue.
When it comes to parents pulling their kids out of private “bilingual” schools, I will admit my experience with private schools has been of the “experimental” variety. These are schools that tend to fail on all fronts, as they spend too much time trying to please parents with expectations that do not align with the educational philosophy of the style of experimental education that they are trying to promote. You cannot be a “bilingual”, “fully authentic” montessori school that guarantees that children will be able to test into TAS for seventh grade, for example. There are too many things that are in direct conflict with each other there and parents see through that once they see what their child is doing/not able to do on their own. (Or they realize they’re spending five or more hours each night doing homework with their child that was already at school for nine hours that day when the kids in the public schools are only in school for four hours most days and do not have that much homework but seem to be in the same place academically)
A lot of Taiwanese parents also realize a few years into “bilingual”/“international” elementary school that their child is not actually going to get very far ahead with fluency in English in Taiwan if they don’t have Chinese fluency to match. They’re in a really confused place — they think that their child will be superior to everyone else if they speak English like a child who was born, raised, and educated in the US, but they also recognize that they are Taiwanese and they are raising their child in Taiwan. Raising your child to basically be a fake American child is really problematic unless they’re going to actually live in the US for junior high life and beyond (and never try to have a career in Taiwan. So blocking out the possibility of returning unless they want to put in a lot of work as an adult). A lot of bilingual experimental elementary schools in Taipei had tons of students for the first few years and then those kids graduated and went on to private junior highs in Taiwan. To say they struggled would be an understatement— by junior high, Taiwanese kids in the traditional public schools will have been exposed to thousands of Chinese characters and be able to write from memory many hundreds. Everyone takes the easiest path in “international” and “bilingual” schools — English is a phonetic language and everything can be (more or less) sounded out. Slightly misspelling a word in English is not as bad as not writing a character correctly, as one can (usually) figure out what you mean). If you don’t put in the work with Chinese, you basically just don’t learn to read and write Chinese. Good luck surviving in Taiwan as a Taiwanese person if you are functionally illiterate in your “native” language.
If you look at the stats on the experimental elementary schools, you can see that there were a lot (with rising student numbers) in the first few years that they were allowed and then an absolute drop off in numbers around the 5-6th year of existence. I imagine that had a lot to do with parents of younger children talking to parents of graduates realizing that the only way to make sure their child would be ready for Taiwan’s secondary Ed would be to put them through taiwan’s traditional elementary Ed.
No. Do the chapter and instructions all in Chinese. Add some key daily English words and sentences into the mix.
For example, I have a PE class where the students are practicing their relay races. So just add in a few basic words and phrases… e.g. Baton, pass the baton, take the baton, run with the baton. That’s it! all other instructions are in Chinese.
No. Emphasis on the lesson material. English carries very little weight.
Not quite. But if you are just simply teaching a class in 100% full English then it isn’t 2 (bi) is it? It is only “lingual.”
Because the location is convenient and people forget and/or presume the school would never let it happen again.
The MOI standards are fairly loose and schools have a lot of freedom to adjust their curriculum.
Simple. They just hire a random teacher from a country that doesn’t have common core. Give them a “common core” textbook to follow… and vollah!
It is all in the American textbooks they buy make the parents buy…
textbook definition (from the multiple times bilingual Ed came up in various courses I took) would be 50% or more of core academic courses taught in the target language. This means social studies, math; science and not art, PE, and “Fun with ABC”. Taiwan instead lives in lala land and thinks it’s OK to just teach a few English vocabulary words in an otherwise Chinese class and call that “bilingual”. Kids who go to bilingual schools, even public bilingual schools, in the US, learn the target language to a point of being able to do the academic work in the L2. Here, you’re lucky if 2% of the class remembered the random vocabulary words they were taught.
I wouldn’t call that lala land. Lala land is believing it’s possible to make all local subject teachers teach 50% of their classes in English lol. It’s simply not possible at all.
Typically those schools are English and Spanish, right? That’s far closer than English and Chinese. I could change almost any English word into a Spanish sounding one and it would be the correct word. For example “Action” I could pronounce it “ack see on” and it would be the correct world
Heck… I can read some Spanish. (No I never learnt Spanish )
Maybe they should just forget bilingual and let kids learn what they need to learn to be literate. English education for those with a need to learn them. Chinese is a hard enough language without needing them to be academically competent in chinese in addition to English. It’s a huge ask for kids, and this isn’t helping parents who might not want to have more children due to the amount of work it needs.
There are a lot of Spanish-English bilingual schools but there are also a lot of Chinese, Japanese, and even at least one Hmong public bilingual school. There are tons of case studies on these schools — they expect full fluency in both languages. They are not 99.8% in English and then “learn some key words in the L2”. That schools in Taiwan are allowed to do that and call themselves “bilingual” lowers the standards that teachers could be held to “we hold you to no standards at all”
Another key thing too… The students in those schools are actually of Japanese, Chinese etc descent with them speaking the target language at home. As opposed to Taiwan where it is comparatively homogeneous.
My school just linked with a bilingual school in Australia and were shocked to see all the “Australian” students look Chinese lol.
If you’re talking about Chinese schools in the states, they are schools parents pay to send their kids to, in order so that they are literate in Chinese.
I think at this point you can’t force every kid in Taiwan to learn everything in 2 languages. I still think English class should be a part of the curriculum, but it should be treated like Spanish is in the US, not something that your academic future hinges on. Most Taiwanese aren’t going to need to have good English proficiency, even those in technical fields.
Otherwise asking children to take on too much work is just asking for trouble. Chinese schoolwork is hard enough already.
Thanks. So I thought of a bilingual curriculum as an accelerated one, typically for advanced students, which was why the idea of a public bilingual school didn’t make sense to me, because being public they can’t turn away local kids and so they’d be saying their whole district is advanced kids. But from your description it does sound like at these schools the students are more or less the general public put through forced academic acceleration. That already sounds like a highly questionable practice, like a draft except everybody is placed into the special forces. And then these schools are not providing adequate help to students who need it to stay afloat despite being public i.e. funded by their parents’ tax money and presumably mandated to service their district. It seems like they’re setting things up in a way so that a percentage of students will likely fail. Isn’t this redolent of gentrification? Well‐off, highly‐educated young parents move in to an area, and via local politics (sorry I am unfamiliar as to how much influence parents have over local public school’s policies) try to bankrupt the poorer parents and/or cause them to move out.
That’s kind of how I thought it would turn out in theory. Time and cognitive resource allocation being zero sum you can’t add some English without subtracting some Chinese can you. I was assuming these schools were somehow teaching twice the amount of material for the price (time and mental energy wise) of one and was excited to read about such state‐of‐the‐art education.
Thanks. It paints an interesting picture of the role of English within a curriculum. But is adding English in arts and PE increasing students’ workload? They’re not tested on these subjects in the high school entrance exam, and I don’t think buxibans care about them.
If you read the bilingual 2030 plan, the goal is only for the top kids in Taiwan to learn English sort of anyway. They’re not making any changes to the EFL curriculum, just trying to mindlessly throw more English out there in other subject classes / put random foreigners in schools so accelerated kids can be farther ahead.
Academic futures in Taiwan hinge on one’s ability to pass standardized tests. There is very little done across the board to support using one’s brain in a meaningful way. English, math, history, etc., it’s all the same. They need to pass tests. Passing English tests usually means you don’t know English and that you can’t survive in the English-speaking world. Plenty of kids I’ve had over the years who can speak English can’t pass the tests and complete the assignments they’re given due to the terrible way they’re written and senseless goals.
Chinese / schoolwork assigned in Taiwan is 99% mindless busywork. I look at the stuff these kids are expected to do and I wonder how the heck people can create assignments without any clear outcome goal in mind and still sleep at night. Money apparently is good enough that they don’t need a moral compass.
