Let’s say for the sake of argument that the Bush administration suddenly decided that every American schoolchild should learn Mandarin. (hey, there might be worse policies!)
So, we establish a Department of Mandarin Education, fund it, and now we have to establish a curriculum and hire administrators and teachers to spread correct Mandarin through the US of A.
How many Taiwanese would vote for allowing non-native Chinese speakers to have the final say on whose Mandarin was good enough to teach in the schools? I know, we’ll hire a Secretary of Mandarin Education who doesn’t speak much Mandarin, and hasn’t studied education or pedagogy in the last 30 years, but has excellent political connections. That person will allow the hiring of unqualified teachers of Mandarin, who will fill class time with meaningless exercises, and we’ll give a test every week, but of course provide outside schools to give the students the answers to the tests and teach them to pick the correct choice (of course our tests will be multiple choice, too much work for the teachers otherwise, and they don’t know how to write a reliable test instrument anyway as they are unqualified) and then we’ll sit back and wonder why our students can’t achieve high scores on the SAT-II in Mandarin.
There are two issues involved: policy/pedagogical planning issues and actual classroom teaching. If competent, educated people who had a clue about teaching were in charge of the first, and if society here didn’t have such a knee-jerk classification reaction of “me Chinese, you foreigner”, maybe we could get the best teachers into the classrooms regardless of their origins, passport nationality or physical appearance. However, as long as we have to batch-process these people, it will always come down to documents, because documents are easier to agree on than actual proficiency, whether in language or teaching.
I am a very skilled speaker of both Chinese and Spanish (i.e., I’m an experienced translator and simultaneous interpreter) but I am NOT native. That being said, I’m a better teacher of Mandarin (at beginning and intermediate levels, not advanced!) than most I’ve seen on this island. But what I’d like to see is a system where my students’ results, my educational background (Ph.D. in Language Teaching) and my own proficiency are actually considered in choosing whether or not to give me a job teaching. I’m sure the Taiwanese teachers of English feel the same way. Those who can compete should be able to, and there should be no difficulty in them getting jobs. Those who cannot need to improve their skills or change fields. The market owes no one a living.
So the answer to Jason’s original question is a resounding “maybe”.