An Examination on the Planning and Practice of Bilingual Education in Primary and Secondary Schools in Taiwan

Over the past few years, several reforms in language education have been outlined to implement the full-scale bilingualization of the education system in Taiwan. Among the 3392 public primary and secondary schools, nearly one-third of them have been implementing bilingual education in certain subjects. The vast majority of these schools have adopted Immersion, CLIL, or EMI as models for bilingual education. It has been argued that these exotic models cannot be “transplanted” to the education context of Taiwan, and he proposes the FERTILE model. Adopting this model as the theoretical framework, this qualitative study aims to examine how school practitioners plan and practice bilingual education in Taiwan. Data were collected through the document analysis of the progress reports from thirty-five primary and secondary schools and three focus group discussions (FGDs) with nine subject teachers. The findings show that the participants made considerable efforts to construct a bilingual environment and have an identical understanding about the strategies for bilingual instruction that emphasize subject knowledge and students’ comprehension. However, the participants experienced a diverse ecology of bilingual teacher learning communities and received differential support from the principals. Qualified and stable teaching manpower was identified as the key to sustain bilingual education. Implications to different education stakeholders are also discussed.