More Taiwanese Tackling English as Tots

Monica Huang is on a crash course in English. Every weekday from 9 to 5, she and her fellow students forsake Chinese and concentrate solely on English in their private language class in downtown Taipei.

Teachers drill them on new vocabulary. Textbooks and audiotapes reinforce the lessons. The students learn fast and respond well, but they look forward to their breaks--time to slurp down some milk, take out their toys and get rid of the ants in their pants: those things you do when, like Monica, you’re only 3 years old.

Though still a toddler, Monica is already a veteran of the intensive language program, having been enrolled a year ago when she was barely out of diapers.

“It’s for her future,” Monica’s mother, Hsieh Shu-huei, said firmly.

Thousands of Hsieh’s peers couldn’t agree more. In swelling numbers, parents in Taiwan are insisting on earlier and earlier education in English for their children, convinced that fluency in the language will be key to their youngsters’ later success.

Immersion classes for tots--where it’s all English, all the time--have zoomed in popularity and proliferated throughout the island. They don’t come cheap: At the Joy American School that Monica attends, tuition is about $1,300 a semester, with an additional $300 in fees every month--a steep sum in Taiwan, where the annual per capita income averages about $12,000.

But it’s worth the sacrifice, parents say, if it helps their kids compete in a world where English is increasingly the lingua franca of commerce and the Internet. Command of the language is also viewed as a potential ticket off the island if Taiwan’s prickly relations with mainland China turn violent.

Even the Taiwanese government has hopped on the bandwagon, lowering the mandatory age for learning English in public school.

Beginning next fall, students in the fifth grade, rather than junior high, will have to start minding their Ps and Qs--literally. The government is scrambling to train 3,000 new instructors to cope with the policy shift.

“There aren’t enough teachers. If there were, we’d drop the age even further,” said Fan Sun-Lu, Taiwan’s deputy minister of education. “The younger the better--they can learn faster.”

Behind the push for early English education is Taiwan’s desire to stay competitive economically and to preserve its reputation as an international center of high-tech development, the source of the island’s growing prosperity in recent years.

“English is an international tool,” Fan said. “In an e-economy age, this kind of tool is even more important.”

Lack of Colonial Past a Disadvantage

Taiwan does not have the linguistic advantage that such neighbors as Hong Kong, Singapore and India enjoy as former British territories, where English is established as an official tongue of education, government and trade.

In 1968, Taiwan began requiring junior high school students to start learning the rudiments of English. Instruction usually focused on reading and writing rather than listening and speaking--to the frustration of Taiwanese from Monica’s mother’s generation.

“When people my age learned, we were too timid to speak English. We felt like we spoke with all sorts of strange intonations,” said Liang Hsinchi, 31, whose 4-year-old daughter, Jennifer, attends the same Joy American School that Monica does.

The new emphasis is on oral skills, particularly speaking with an American accent, prized by Taiwanese parents for their youngsters. Although many teachers at the Joy American School hail from other English-speaking nations, from Britain to Australia, American terms and spellings in class are de rigueur.

By starting so early, “our kids won’t be afraid to talk to foreigners,” Hsieh said. “They’ll find it very natural.”

Students are segregated by age, starting at 3 years old. Some are too young to know much Chinese yet, let alone English. First-time applicants 5 and older are rejected because the school wants its young charges to follow the curriculum from beginning to end, until they graduate, amid pomp and circumstance, at age 6.

Despite Monica’s long hours in class, Hsieh, 39, said she puts no pressure on her daughter.

“When they first start, the teacher uses games. The kids don’t see it as pressure--they see it as fun,” Hsieh said. “It’s not as if at home we say, ‘Memorize these words’ or anything like that. Our demands aren’t heavy.”

The curriculum combines games, outings and lessons in different subjects, from arts to science, to keep the children engaged. Classes are limited to 16 students.

Like schoolchildren everywhere, the pupils are alternately focused and fidgety.

Teacher Arlene Nash, a Canadian, shushes her group of 3- and 4-year-old beginners one morning, then holds up some purple plastic fruit.

“What are these?” she asks.

A slight pause ensues, followed by a chorus of enthusiastic voices: “Gwaaaaapes!”

Then everybody sits down to eat a sample of the real thing, in a classroom plastered with colorful drawings with English captions and a Roman alphabet written in glitter. Even the patterned curtains have English words worked into the design.

“They have to survive in English” in class, explained Peggy Huang, the founder and chief executive of Joy Enterprises, which has grown from a living-room operation 20 years ago into a chain of 150 schools, most of them after-school prep courses serving students up to age 16.

In 1992, Huang opened her first total-immersion program for pre-kindergartners. There are now eight Joy preschools.

Total-Immersion Programs Expect Boost

Other private companies--and they are legion--run similar programs. They expect a further boost in enrollment from the government’s new English-earlier policy because more parents, they say, will be clamoring to ensure that their kids have a leg up on their peers.

These outfits find their ambitions constrained by the same factor hampering the Taiwanese government: not enough teachers.

The demand is enormous. Newspapers are littered with ads for English teachers, one of the most common occupations for expatriates in Taiwan. Huang even has recruiters overseas on the lookout for potential candidates.

Mark Knight, 29, arrived in Taipei 4 1/2 years ago and discovered that he could make far more money doing practically the same thing he was doing in London as a day-care worker: minding small children and speaking to them in English.

“There’s very little difference between what I’m doing here and what I was doing at home,” Knight said--except, perhaps, having to remember to say “ba-NAH-na” instead of “ba-NAW-na” and “trash can” instead of “rubbish bin,” to fall in line with American, not the queen’s, English.

Like the other teachers, Knight does not assign homework or make his pint-size students take tests, although the school encourages parents to supplement their kids’ daily English intake in class with more English at home.

Wealth Apparent in Classrooms

Almost all of those households are well-heeled. The cost of programs like the Joy American School virtually ensures that fact.

“I got the feeling some of the kids were rich when they started showing up in complete Yves Saint Laurent outfits--new stuff every day, nothing repeated,” Knight said.

For those who can’t afford private tuition, the only possibilities for bilingual education lie in experimental public schools such as Hsin Sheng Elementary in central Taipei, a gleaming campus so new that workers were still unwrapping furniture and nailing signs on bathrooms last month.

Hsin Sheng boasts nine teachers devoted purely to teaching English. Seven have received some sort of education in North America.

Students are exposed to English starting in kindergarten, through stories and songs. By the sixth grade, the kids sit through two hours a week of English instruction, including reading and writing.

Novel as that is for a public school, parents who have already pushed their kids through two or three years of pre-kindergarten English complain that it’s not enough for their children.

“They ask us, ‘Where’s the beef?’ ” said teacher Leah Wang.

Ironically, however, the heavy advance schooling in English has a boomerang effect.

“From 2 to 6, their entire education is in English,” Wang said. “When they reach our school, where all our education is in Chinese except for a few hours a week, they need to adjust.”

Hsieh has a solution for that. After Monica graduates from Joy, she’ll go on to another private school--one that, of course, stresses English.