Elementary School Teachers’ Perceptions and Practice of Bilingual Education in Taiwan

Abstract

The Taiwanese government announced a bilingual policy in 2021. Among the goals of this policy is that by the year 2030 one out of three schools nation-wide both in elementary and secondary education will conduct bilingual instruction in content subjects. To reach this goal, in the same year the Ministry of Education launched bilingual education promotion projects which encourage elementary and secondary schools to implement bilingual instruction in both Mandarin Chinese and English. Since then up to the end of 2022, one third of the elementary schools island wide have started bilingual instruction in one form or another. However, few studies explore how this bilingual education policy is perceived by parents and teachers and how teachers adapt to this policy. This presentation includes two parts: one study that investigates parents’ and elementary school teachers’ understanding and perceptions of the Chinese-English bilingual education policy by employing a self-developed questionnaire distributed to 266 participants, including 188 parents and 78 teachers and one report of a firsthand observation of elementary school teachers’ struggling and adaption regarding implementing bilingual education in their class. Implications and suggestions are proposed accordingly for school teachers and administrators.

Keywords

bilingual policy, bilingual education, elementary school