The Various Situations of International Students' Taking Courses In Taiwan

2009/03/21 Taiwan by Lin

The same interviewees in the news “Taiwanese universities attract international students” are again interviewed of their further situations of taking courses in Taiwan, including the percentage of courses lectured in Chinese, in English, and in half-Chinese half-English they take, the situation of their being able to understand the classes or not, the advantages and the disadvantages of the three types of classes, and the situations of taking courses in other universities.

Five of the interviewees are graduate students, three are undergraduates, two are Ph.D. students. Their majors include enginering, english, computer science, business administration, environmetal sustainable, and network learning. The average percentage of the courses they take is 17% in Chinese, 76.13% in English, 6.79% in half-Chinese half-English. The student from Haiti is not included in this statistics because she didn’t take any courses for the reason that there are no required courses for her program. The student from Guatemala has a program in which all courses are lectured in English. Three of them didn’t take any Chinese courses for not being able to understand Chinese.

From the opinions of taking Chinese courses are the advantage of improving Chinese, and the disadvantage of not being able to understand or the hardness of following the point of the classes. Among them are two exceptions: One is the Chinese French, who has some basic ability of Chinese and said the traditional characters is the challenge for her. The other is one French girl, who takes Chinese classes specially designed for foreign students, in which the teachers are more patient and explain more words.

For courses lectured in half-Chinese half-English, six of them said they can understand the classes because teachers repeat in English what they said in Chinese. Among the six students, some said they still prefer courses lectured in English, some said it’s great experiences because it helps them a lot in learning Chinese and English is useful to explain Chinese terms. The other two students said they can’t understand the classes fully because teachers lecture in Chinese and just slide in English and local students answer questions in Chinese.

Six of the students said the courses lectured in English are enough for them to take to meet their graduation requirements. Among the students, one student from USA said he can discuss with his professor to have their classes all in English. Another one said they are enough if you don’t take courses related to your field into consideration, otherwise it may not be enough. The other students said they are not enough. Among them the student from Guatemala said his program of English courses are shortened and the new opened classes are not related to the classes closed, which is a hole unresolved. The other students’ solutions are to take other courses lectured in English, take the courses and study individually by using English textbooks, and take courses in other universities.

The two Ph.D. students have the experiences of taking courses in other universities. They said the convenience is that the courses are lectured in English completely, and the inconveniences are the waste of time and money for transportation, the waste of time to wait for classes to start after arrived there, which sometimes takes one to three hours, and the troubles to adapt new environments with a lot of language gap.

Overall, the situations of international students’ taking courses in Taiwan are complicated and various from different cases. We can see some good sides made for international students, such as the special design of courses lecture in English and in half-Chinese half-English. And also some issues that took place, such as the gap between languages and the inconveniences of not enough courses lectured in English. Thus, the Government and the universities in Taiwan may have to create more solutions to make the educational system for international students more perfect.