Protecting Taiwan's Indigenous Languages and Cultures



Protecting Taiwan's Indigenous Languages and Cultures

Introduction

Background of the study

With the fast development of the internet and other modern communicated technologies, people interacted earlier than ever beyond boarders of sovereign states. Now we lived in a global village. Globalization and localization turn out to be the two competing forces in the globalization era. Many scholars hold different opinions about this issue. Yet as Robertson(1992) raised the concept of “Glocalization”, meaning there is neither pure globalization , nor pure localization. The two phenomena have been interacted and coexisted. Such idea implies that we should not only keep in touch with people and countries all over the earth, and learn, exchange culture, trade with each other, but also need to highly value our own local assets, like Taiwan's indigenous heritage.

According to the population survey in 2009 (Council of Indigenous Peoples, 2010 ), there were 14 indigenous tribes in Taiwan with total populations of 504,531. Although they are minorities, but their cultures and languages are very important assets in Taiwan. However, in past 50 years, the Taiwan government ignored the value of indigenous culture, and tried to assimilate indigenous peoples by political and educational means. After 50 years, many indigenous culture heritages nearly extinguished, and many indigenous peoples can not spoke their tribe languages. As Ji Wa Shi ?Ba Wan(2005)said, the indigenous peoples under 20 years old almost can not speak their tribe languages, especially those young people and children who emigrated to cities.

Fortunately, recently the Taiwan government has changed its attitude and has paid more attending to the problem and proposed some policies to save the indigenous cultures and languages. However, it is not an easy task to evaluate the effects. For example, since 2007, Council of Indigenous Peoples, Executive Yuan carried out the “ Language nest curriculum policy ”, a program copied form the Maori people in New Zealand with the purpose to revive the tribe languages from early child education. Yet the kindergartens and child care centers offer only one to two hours tribe language lesson a week, far from enough for learning a language faced extermination.

A great amount of tribe kindergartens and early child care centers implementing whole Maori language and culture immersion teaching are the key factors that the Maori people revived Maori language and culture. According to the experience of Maori people, I supposed whole tribe language and culture immersion teaching in tribe kindergartens and early child care centers could be one of the best ways to revive the indigenous languages and cultures in Taiwan.

Purpose of the study

With the background of the study, the main purpose of the study is to discuss a case of whole tribe language and culture immersion teaching at a tribe child care center in Taiwan. This study tries to answer the following questions: What is immersion teaching model? Is there any successful case? What is the development process of the whole tribe language and culture immersion teaching at the tribe child care centers? And what achievement has ...