Years later where is the evidence that keeping foreigners out of Kindergartens has helped students?

As usual, no links :unamused: .

You need a bit more sarcasm and contempt in your request! :wink:

[quote=“cyborg_ninja”][quote=“bababa”]In English-speaking parts of Canada, there are lots of French-immersion kindys, as well as French-immersion elementary schools and a few high schools.
My nephew goes to one - he understands French, can read it well, but he doesn’t really speak it properly.[/quote]

Yeah because French is an official language, bit different from a Taiwanese kid who learns English at kindy when no one else in the country speaks it on a native level (except for expats and their kids).[/quote]

Actually not very different at all. My niece did french immersion as well but outside the classroom there was no French environment as they lived in Vancouver. The fact that one can find french on apple juice containers and cereal boxes is really not significant. :laughing:

In Taiwan, most of the kids who study at kindie continue on at buxiban. The kids I taught 16 years ago are now in uni and have very good English levels. I taught them till grade 3 (and then they had other teachers) but kept in touch. In high school they barely needed to study to pass tests.

The fact that you lost your Japanese is not really germane. It’s easy to find an English environment in Taiwan to maintain and improve one’s level.

[quote=“Mucha Man”]
The fact that you lost your Japanese is not really germane. It’s easy to find an English environment in Taiwan to maintain and improve one’s level.[/quote]

It’s also easy to find a Japanese environment in Taiwan as well, but that’s not the point now is it? It’s whether its necessary for kindy kids to learn another language. Shit my English is fine too but I didn’t learn English when I was in kindy. Sure its a lot better if a kid lives in an English environment where the language is used, but don’t you think you actually have to go out of your way to use English in Taiwan? Besides hanging out with Expats or ABCs, English is rarely used on a day-day basis. Taiwan isn’t exactly Hong Kong or Singapore, even in Hong Kong English is rarely used nowadays and people start to speak more mandarin.

Edit: If you really want to learn a language, it takes only 2-3 years to become fluent. Even quicker if you live in a country where the language is spoken on a day-to-day basis.

[quote=“cyborg_ninja”][quote=“Muzha Man”]
The fact that you lost your Japanese is not really germane. It’s easy to find an English environment in Taiwan to maintain and improve one’s level.[/quote]

It’s also easy to find a Japanese environment in Taiwan as well, but that’s not the point now is it? It’s whether its necessary for kindy kids to learn another language. [/quote]

Sigh. You made the point that learning English in Taiwan is not like learning French in Canada. Only it is very similar in that there is not a wide French speaking community in most places kids learn. But they seem to do just fine. Which argues that kids in Taiwan can do just fine learning English in kindie and later buxiban or school settings. In fact, we know they can, as anyone who has been involved with teaching can tell you.

Yes, whether it is necessary for them to do so is another issue. Stop mixing up everything up all the time.

Well it’s the classic case of reaching a conclusion first and working back from there.
Keeping foreigners out of Kindergarten was not the intent of the regulations as has been discussed here ad infinitum. It was more about preventing the kids getting stuck into the grind so young rather than preventing them learning two languages simultaneously. I think Taiwanese should have an appreciation that this is possible to achieve given that there are so many people who can speak multiple dialects here.
It’s all about creating an environment for learning and sustaining that environment. So kindergartens can function as one part of that.
English may not be neccessary for Taiwanese to learn for everyone, but it’s an important skill to have and for many jobs it is neccessary to have some English otherwise you will not even get hired in the first place. It’s like a degree, if you don’t have one you can close off options for yourself.

[quote=“Mucha Man”][quote=“cyborg_ninja”][quote=“Muzha Man”]
The fact that you lost your Japanese is not really germane. It’s easy to find an English environment in Taiwan to maintain and improve one’s level.[/quote]

It’s also easy to find a Japanese environment in Taiwan as well, but that’s not the point now is it? It’s whether its necessary for kindy kids to learn another language. [/quote]

Sigh. You made the point that learning English in Taiwan is not like learning French in Canada. Only it is very similar in that there is not a wide French speaking community in most places kids learn. But they seem to do just fine. Which argues that kids in Taiwan can do just fine learning English in kindie and later buxiban or school settings. In fact, we know they can, as anyone who has been involved with teaching can tell you.

Yes, whether it is necessary for them to do so is another issue. Stop mixing up everything up all the time.[/quote]

I would doubt learning English in kindy had such a huge impact on English abilities :unamused: :unamused: :unamused: My friend Ben didn’t learn English until he was in 3rd grade living in London, got sent to to an American school in 5th grade in Kaohsiung. He scored a 5 on the AP Literature test, which pretty much means this kids English is better than 95% of his peers.

It’s all about whether you’re using English on a day to day basis when you’re older. Just like any language if you don’t use it you lose it, no matter how many years of learning has gone into it.

CN, don’t insult the many people who have spent years teaching here, they are the ones who have the experience at ground level and I have known many teachers who care deeply about their students progress. I agree with you that you can pick up later on though, my ex-gf only started learning in Junior High school and her English was amazing, simply because she had an interest in Western pop music and liked to read the gossip magazines!

My own opinion on this is pretty simple: Taiwanese are clueless as to how to run a Kindergarten in the first place and the government wants to control family decisions. I’ll even go off the generalization of a poster above (sorry…don’t always read the names). If one suggests there are 5 foreigners that have been trained to work in Kindergartens, I bet there are 5 Taiwanese who have been trained by a good professor in the subject. Have you seen kindergartens in Taiwan? Workbooks, hand slapping, worksheets, copying off a white board, and pointless field trips are the norm. These are all done by people who went to college to build up this drivel of education.

If you’re against it, your words tend to point out the mess. I hear the dumbest arguments. “Students shouldn’t have to learn a language…” It’s a funny thing for a Montessorian to read. Learning should be about fostering the love of learning, not forcing learning. So to me, it’s such a silly argument, as is the argument that they’ll lose it later. Who cares what they retain and what they lose? Denying a child the o pportunity to learn means they learn less. Learning a language now, in the right environment, means they might spark an interest in learning later. If not a language, then a culture, history…anything!

The arguments against this make no sense to me because it’s stuff I couldn’t care less about. Bottom line: government decided to overtake control of education from the parents in yet another aspect. Let’s face it: with the quality of Kindergartens that overrun this country, you’ll never be able to use the “foreigners aren’t qualified” argument.

Where did CN insult anyone about their years spent teaching here? All he did was point out that he didn’t learn English till later on after kindergarten and does quite fine with the English language. You then confirm that with your own statement that your ex GF learnt from Junior High School and her English is amazing.

Just goes to prove CN’s point that kids do not need to be learning English from Kindergarten to be able to be proficient in English later on in life. As already pointed out by others, thge rules were not implemented to keep foreign teachers out of kindergartens. As I have said many times in the past, I would suppport the law being changed but only if qualified persons were teaching, those with the proper early childhood educational quals not those with just any degree. :2cents:

Really, where? At Carnegies?

Where did CN insult anyone about their years spent teaching here? All he did was point out that he didn’t learn English till later on after kindergarten and does quite fine with the English language. You then confirm that with your own statement that your ex GF learnt from Junior High School and her English is amazing.

Just goes to prove CN’s point that kids do not need to be learning English from Kindergarten to be able to be proficient in English later on in life. As already pointed out by others, thge rules were not implemented to keep foreign teachers out of kindergartens. As I have said many times in the past, I would suppport the law being changed but only if qualified persons were teaching, those with the proper early childhood educational quals not those with just any degree. :2cents:[/quote]

I can’t find it now but I’m sure he got a dig in somewhere earlier about English teachers, or maybe it was my imagination, if so mea culpa. There should be properly qualified and vetted staff teaching in schools here, but of course that was not the point with the change in regulations. The fact is though they will not be able to pay native English or foreign speakers with suitable qualifications the kind of wages they could demand in other countries.

A couple of posts were removed.

Well there are many countries that have degrees recognized both in western countries and in Taiwan that teach Early Childhood. Taiwan should open up to many other English speaking countries such as India Philippines Singapore Malaysia and get people in from those countries as well as UK Australia Canada USA etc

People take salaries at local market rates. I am sure if the rates for teaching English were the same as many TA’s get who are in fact better teachers a lot of people would leave.

Well Taiwanese will then need to change their values and stop looking at skin colour all the time let alone their obsession about accents.

Yep. This is my reply whenever I get someone saying ‘Oh, but you foreigners get paid way more for teaching than we do!’

It isn’t foreigners giving out the salary. ‘You Taiwanese decide to pay us that much!’

CN, I’ll say that there’s very little need to learn a second/third/fourth language from a young age, but there are all sorts of studies describing the cognitive benefits of multilingualism. It’s never a bad idea, per se.

Aren’t there studies which said that the brain learns in a spongelike manner before 12 or so and after that it tries to pick up languages in a more analytical manner. It just gets harder if I remember right. There’s also the problem that as you get older you tend to have less time to devote to learning extra languages.

I know languages are easier to learn when you’re younger. I always thought getting older makes languages harder to learn since we tend to try and apply logic to everything as we get older, and what is logically true for one language very rarely carries over into another. That’s a guess based off how I seem to learn though, so I have no idea =S

Some of it is that we don’t get a chance for so much interaction in different languages when we older, that’s what I have also heard.

I don’t see the problem. Imagine an international couple, a native English speaker and a native Chinese speaker, with kid(s). The English-speaking parent provides an English environment to the kid(s) (by speaking with them in English); the Chinese-speaking parent provides a Chinese environment. English speaking parent takes the kid(s) for an outing, and they converse in English all day. (“Look at the lion! Now let’s go see the elephant!”, etc.)

M13 is doing exactly that, and his son is learning both English and Chinese.

Result: kid learns the local language (which happens to be a vital language in Asia, and gaining importance in business, especially of the cross-Straits kind), and English (which is the most widely spoken lingua franca in the world, and de rigueur in international commerce).