Fourteen young men doing alternative military service, all fluent in English, are doing their part for English education in Taiwan’s north-central Miaoli County.
The county educational bureau established a Mobile English Village in 2008, hiring foreign English teachers to travel to elementary schools throughout the county on Wednesday afternoons to teach local pupils English. Communication was sometimes difficult, but with assistance from the draftees the barriers have been overcome.
The bureau said the servicemen, many with diplomas from well-known universities and even graduate schools abroad, spend their days guiding the English teaching at remote schools, and show up each Wednesday to help out with the Mobile English Village program.
The young men also attend many English teaching activities within the county, including meetings of various teachers groups, helping foreign teachers in setting up curricula and planning instruction. These fluent speakers are not that much older than the students being served, and are full of enthusiasm and vitality, which reduces the students’ anxiety and guides them into an instructional environment with nothing but English.
The bureau said that in the past two years, the alternative service members have served over 6,000 students in this way. They have been honored by the Ministry of Education’s Central English Guidance Team and various county-level English teaching groups, and have been recommended to head up next year’s English Village program.
Huang Jie-ping, a graduate in economics from York University in Toronto, said helping children learn English and enjoy it, as well as guiding them to be bold in speaking the language, is a very satisfying and meaningful thing to do.
(This article originally appeared in The Liberty Times Dec. 9.)