Language education as a site for identity negotiation: The practice of new immigrant language instruction in Taiwan

Abstract

Since the early 2000s, the Taiwanese government has been increasingly employing multiculturalism as a frame for imagining Taiwanese nationhood for political and economic strategy, aiming at strengthening ties with Southeast Asian countries. In recent years, the official imaginary of multicultural Taiwan has taken a new direction to include previously neglected groups of minorities, such as immigrants from Southeast Asian countries. In 2019, seven Southeast Asian languages were introduced into the national curriculum. While this reflects the government’s desire to include immigrants’ cultures and languages in the formal curriculum to promote a multicultural vision of Taiwanese identity, it also potentially creates a new avenue for immigrants to negotiate their identities in school classrooms. Through two case studies conducted at primary schools in New Taipei City, this study explores the interaction of local immigrant teachers and official identity discourses. Evaluating language education from a critical multicultural perspective, we argue that minority language instruction could be a catalyst for raising the status of the speakers of these languages in Taiwanese society, but only in so far as it signifies their genuine inclusion in the knowledge construction process.

Keywords:

• Taiwan
• minority language education
• multiculturalism
• identity negotiation
• educational policy

1. Introduction

As exemplified by discourses in China regarding “quality (suzhi) education” and in Japan “human resource (Jinzai)” development, the cultivation of “human capital” for national growth dominates public debate on formal education in East Asia today (UNESCO-MGIEP, 2017). Language education, along with other fields of learning, thus tends to be regarded from an instrumentalist perspective, emphasising an individual’s cognitive development and economic advancement while overlooking or concealing political aspects. However, any policies that deal with the intrinsically cultural phenomenon of language are inevitably entangled with political agendas. Theorising the minority language classroom as a place where the native-speaking teacher encounters and reinterprets official discourse regarding their own culture and identity, this study thus examines the experience of Southeast Asian immigrant teachers’ experience in teaching “New Immigrant languages” in Taiwan.

In 2019, Taiwan incorporated seven Southeast Asian languages (Vietnamese, Indonesian, Thai, Burmese, Cambodian, Malay, and Filipino) into its school curriculum (Ministry of Education [MOE], 2018). With this reform, students could choose one of the languages mentioned above as a mandatory native language course once a week in public schools (Ministry of Education [MOE], 2021). The curricular guidelines state the aim of this new provision is to promote greater awareness of cultural diversity as it relates to Taiwan’s growing population of “new immigrants (xinzhumin)” and their families (MOE, 2018). Consequently, new questions have emerged on how the national curriculum portrays these Southeast Asian languages and cultures, how the Southeast Asian teachers interpret and implement the language policy based on their experience in Taiwan, and how multiculturalism will be further promoted through this policy. These questions arise from unresolved tensions in Taiwanese identity politics.

1.1. Historical background of identity in Taiwan

After the end of Japanese colonisation in 1945, Taiwan fell under the authoritarian control of the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, KMT). For almost five decades, the KMT imposed its China-centred ideology that emphasised the goal of recapturing the mainland from the Chinese Communist Party. However, in the 1970s, the KMT started to face challenges from local Taiwanese citizens demanding a more Taiwan-centred policy focus and international pressure for democratisation.

By the late 1980s, Taiwanese nationalism flared in resistance to political and cultural repression under the KMT’s authoritarian rule. Taiwanese nativists, joined by other dissatisfied groups, including ethnic minority groups such as Hakka and Indigenous peoples, commenced social movements to push for greater freedom and civil rights (R. R. Wu, 2002). Both the KMT and the opposing politicians at the time decided to employ the concept of multiculturalism as a new imaginary Taiwanese nationhood to mediate the tensions among the four major ethnic groups: Minnanese,¹ Mainlanders,² Hakka,³ and the Indigenous⁴ community. At this juncture, Taiwanese national identity came to be defined in terms of a locally-oriented “multiculturalism”, drawing on shared memories of resistance to Japanese colonisation and KMT oppression (Wang, 2016).

Since then, recognition and celebration of cultural diversity have become a mainstream position in the discourse related to Taiwanese identity. However, local scholars have criticised what they see as the deployment of the rhetoric of multiculturalism as a cure-all for almost any social problem (Liu & Lin, 2011). Successive governments have invoked multiculturalism as a remedy for previous injustice and a salve for domestic cultural conflicts (Wang, 2016). Meanwhile, various civil activists and NGOs have employed multicultural rhetoric in support of various political agendas. Multiculturalism has become a slogan of the feminist movements calling for gender equality, Hakka and Indigenous groups demanding native language education and Southeast Asian immigrants pressing for more inclusive citizenship legislation (Hsia, 2016). Recently, the government has been promoting a multicultural vision of Taiwan, as a means of maintaining an ideological distance from mainland China (Lan, 2019). Meanwhile, multiculturalism is increasingly hailed as a key to Taiwanese economic success.

As multicultural agenda is becoming more and more prominent in Taiwanese society, the public and official approach to immigrants from Southeast Asia is also shifting—an aspect of identity discourse to which we now turn.

1.2. Context: new immigrants in Taiwan

The Ministry of Interior defines new immigrants as spouses of Taiwanese who are foreign; stateless; or from Mainland China, Hong Kong, or Macao (Ministry of Interior [MOI], 2016). These people consist of 2.6% of the total population in Taiwan and come primarily from Mainland China and Southeast Asian countries (Ministry of Affairs [MOA], 2021, 16). As most of them are women who migrate to Taiwan as spouses of Taiwanese men in search of a better life, they are often associated with the pattern of feminised migration seen more widely across East Asia (Hsia, 2018). In the case of Taiwan, although there are no relevant statistical data, existing empirical studies suggest many of them are ethnic Han, who have relied on their ethnic and cultural background, including Chinese languages and personal ties, to meet Taiwanese husbands or to move to Taiwan to enjoy an improved livelihood (Cheng, 2014). For the purpose of this study of new immigrant language (NIL) education, we use the term “new immigrants” here to refer to those from Southeast Asia.

Although many of them were already in Taiwan since the early 1990s, the inclusion of Southeast Asian spouses in the multicultural vision of Taiwanese nationhood is rather a recent phenomenon. As the cross-strait relationship deteriorated sharply after the victory of the DPP in the 2016 presidential election, the new Tsai administration began to turn to Southeast Asian countries. Symbolic of this turn was the launch of a “New Southbound Policy” in 2016: an economic investment drive focused on Southeast Asia. Consequently, new immigrants’ cultural ties with Southeast Asia began to be seen more as a multicultural asset for Taiwan’s future (Lan, 2019). In fact, during the 2016 election campaign, new immigrants were presented as mothers conferring multicultural capital on Taiwan’s future leaders (Cheng et al., 2019).

Questions remain regarding the extent to which this reflects a genuinely inclusive reimagining of Taiwanese identity, or a more tactical attempt to appropriate new immigrants and their cultures for the benefit of the “native” majority. As Lan (2019, 329) puts it, the suspicion arises that new immigrant cultures are merely being instrumentalised for “the imagination of a globalised national future, in which Taiwan could build stronger alliances with ASEAN countries as a bulwark against the political and economic threats posed by China”.

Alongside the growing embrace of a multicultural vision of Taiwan, language policy and planning have increasingly adopted the rhetoric of multilingualism since the 1990s (Wang, 2016). The inclusion of Southeast Asian language in the formal curriculum potentially creates a new avenue for new immigrants to negotiate their identities beyond the domestic realm, in the more public context of the school. The new curriculum reform, which involves employing Southeast Asian spouses as public-school teachers, provides an opportunity for them to construct knowledge of their own cultures through classroom practice. From this perspective, the policy weakens systematic barriers that have thus far prevented new immigrants from participating in constructing knowledge concerning themselves and their cultures.

2. Literature review

Here we review new immigrants’ identity negotiation and public and media discourse on new immigrants’ identity. We then review its relatively unexplored aspect, Malay and Burmese immigrants in Taiwan.

2.1. Identity negotiation of new immigrants

On a microscopic level, previous literature has suggested that new immigrants’ scope for identity negotiation is mostly limited to the domestic realm, where imposed gender roles constrain their self-perception as chaste mothers and loyal wives (Cheng, 2021; Yeh et al., 2015; Wu, 2019). Based on an empirical study of Southeast Asian mothers’ experiences with raising children in Taiwan, Lin (2019) showed that many new immigrant mothers were compelled to conform to their expected, gendered role within the family, abandoning their cultural traditions in order to gain recognition and acceptance from their in-laws and the local Taiwanese community. Their assigned gender role as a mother, in creating a pathway for integration into Taiwanese society, assumes prominence in any efforts at social mobilisation, while their ethnic identity is suppressed (Cheng, 2021). In traditional Taiwanese households, new immigrants face an intersection of imposed gender roles and discriminatory ethnic stereotypes that suppresses their distinctive cultural identities and heritage.

2.2. New immigrants in public and media discourse

On a national level, the Southeast Asian origins of new immigrants have been widely portrayed as a source of alarm from a pseudo-eugenicist perspective, due to societal stereotypes that assign them “inferior” status in cultural, ethnic, or racial hierarchies (Cheng, 2013). Cheng’s study shows how citizenship legislation represents them as poor, unskilled women from backward countries, whose mothering skills require constant monitoring by their in-laws. New immigrants were long excluded from official visions of Taiwanese nationhood, with discriminatory and assimilative discourse predominating into the 2000s. However, during the 2010s, public narratives began to take on a more inclusive tone, especially when the political and economic interest in Southeast Asia grew under the Tsai administration (Huang, 2021). Nevertheless, the official discourse on new immigrants was thus transitioning from portraying them as a threat to Taiwan’s future, while their gender identity as a mother, of new Taiwanese (xintaiwanren), continues to be prioritised in the official discourse.

2.3. Malay and Burmese immigrants in Taiwan

Previous literature mostly focuses on Vietnamese, Indonesian, and Thai immigrants and literature on Malaysian and Burmese immigrants is limited. The existing literature on Malaysian immigrants covers Chinese-Malaysian’ motivation for pursuing their studies in Taiwanese higher education (Teo, 2021), the LBGT Malaysian (Yu, 2022), and illegal Malaysian immigrant workers’ in Taiwan (Tsay, 1992). These imply that many Malaysian immigrants in Taiwan are overseas Chinese who are fluent in Mandarin and graduated from independent Chinese schools in Malaysia. They also suggest, Taiwan as an LGBTQ-friendly, multicultural, and democratic state, with historical and cultural ties with China attracts some Chinese Malaysians. However, although the literature covers the experience of Malaysians residing in Taiwan from gender to a legal perspective, the number of literature is still insignificant. Particularly, a study of identity negotiation of Malaysian spouses in Taiwan is entirely absent.

On the other hand, although previous research on Burmese immigrants in Taiwan is equally small, scholars have examined Burmese communities’ identity negotiation through food cuisine (C. T. Wu & Chang, 2015) and festivals (Lu, 2008). The literature shows Burmese immigrants tend to have an internal struggle with their identity due to their feeling of being outcast in both Burma and in Taiwan (Lu, 2008). The Burmese immigrants in Taiwan have peculiar characteristics in comparison to other Southeast Asian immigrants. The Burmese community in Taiwan is composed of diverse groups of people with ethnic ties to various regions of China such as Fujian, Yunnan and Guangzhou (C. T. Wu & Chang, 2015). Many of their ancestors migrated to Burma during the Qing dynasty, in search of business opportunities or after leaving Burmese outposts under the KMT during World War II. However, in the 1950s, more and more people emigrated to Taiwan along with the KMT army, and anti-China sentiment in Burma prompted some to migrate to Taiwan. In particular, the 1988 Burmese riots forced many of them to move to Taiwan (C. T. Wu & Chang, 2015).

Kasai (2022)’s study indicates that Taiwanese official discourse tends to downplay cultural or ethnic experience of Southeast Asian immigrants that are associated with Chinese identity, their ethnic Han identity in particular. In the official discourse, new immigrants tend to be viewed simply or monolithically as “natives” of their original countries (Cheng, 2014). Thus, based on their potential misrepresentation of them in the official discourse, this study focuses on the teaching of two particular languages, Burmese and Malay, to shed light on whether, or how far, the formal curriculum does in fact constrain the scope for teachers to articulate or explain to their Taiwanese students the complexity and hybridity of Southeast Asian cultures.

3. Critical multiculturalism

In this study, we employ critical multiculturalism as the theoretical framework to evaluate the potential and limitations of language education in promoting social transformation. Drawing upon critical theory, critical multiculturalism is associated with the rise of post-structural views of human identities that emphasise their socio-historically constructed nature. Rather than taking for granted the normative connotations multiculturalism is widely assumed to carry, theorists of critical multiculturalism argue that multicultural ideologies can be just as oppressive as monoculturalism insofar as they presume an atomic, a historical view of identity (May, 2009). This study defines critical multiculturalism as a process of critical work that entails examination and reflection of the unbalanced power structured, in which every individual is located differently. It is a process of a deconstruction of the biased identity discourse and reconstruction of the marginalised knowledge and history for a more balanced, social structure (May et al., 2010; Sloan et al., 2018).

The debate over critical multiculturalism suggests the potential impact of the inclusion of minority languages in formal curricula is contingent on the extent to which the educational provision manages to enhance the agency of the oppressed minorities to deconstruct and reconstruct the public discourse of their identity. Previous research illustrates the difficulty of implementing the critical multicultural educational practice due to the gap between the theoretical discussion and the reality educators face in everyday teaching (May et al., 2010). Critical multiculturalism is not only theoretically dense but also avoids generalisation and standardisation of the educational model. May et al. (2010) and Sloan et al. (2018) conducted case-based studies and reviewed various educational methods to demonstrate how local educators and cultural workers could conduct transformative teaching in a site-specific context. However, most of these attempts assume local teachers’ subjectivity and agency; seldom taking into account structural constraints within the context of schooling. Therefore, taking Taiwan as a case, this study examines the experience of Southeast Asian minorities in negotiating or interpreting official curricular discourse on their identities as they take up the role of public-school teachers.

4. Research questions and methodology

This study examines two teachers’ classroom practices to identify how they interpret and negotiate the officially envisaged role of Southeast Asian languages and cultures. In order to achieve this, we address two research questions:

1. How do the participating teachers teach the language and socio-cultural contexts in contrast to how the teaching manuals expect?

2. How do the teachers’ interpretations and understandings of their “native” languages and cultures influence their teaching practices?

Then, we use the research questions as a guide to understand the possibilities and limitations of language education for minorities as a site for promoting inclusive social building.

4.1. Method: multiple-case study

The study examines a Burmese class and a Malay class from different public primary schools (Schools A and B, respectively) in New Taipei City in the 2019–2020 school year. The details of each case are as follows (Table 1).

Table 1. Background of the main participants and their class information

	Teacher A	Teacher B
Teaching subject	Burmese	Malay
Origin of country	Burma	Malaysia
School	School A	School B
Total years as a teacher	6 years	8 years
Ethnicity/gender	Chinese/female	Chinese/female
Grade level	Grade 1	Grade 2
Gender of the students	2 Male/2 Female	1 Male/4 Female

Before selecting the two classrooms, we picked two schools as potential sites. Since School A is one of the schools with the largest new immigrant population in New Taipei City (Ministry of Education [MOE], 2019, 108), we selected it as a representative case of a general public school facing the challenge of meeting the needs of a large population of new immigrant children. School B, also known as the centre of NIL education, was selected due to its involvement in the development of the NIL curriculum and its implementation.

After preliminary observations of multiple classrooms at each school, we decided the Burmese and the Malay classes would be suitable for our study, considering the scarce amount of literature existing, the potential misrepresentation of them in the curricular discourse, and the two teachers’ collaborative attitude towards our research.

4.2. Data collection

Through the process of conducting the case studies, various data were collected. These include:

• Field notes from a total of 32 class observations (16 for each school)

• 32 audio recordings of the class (16 for each school)

• Pictures of the classes

• The textbooks and the teachers’ manuals

• The curricular guidelines for NIL

The curriculum guidelines for NIL are a policy document that outlines the curricular framework for the seven Southeast Asian languages, including curricular aims, teaching objectives, learning targets, evaluation methods, and guidance on teaching material development. In this study, we collected the most widely used NIL textbooks in New Taipei City. These textbooks are developed by a compilation committee set up by the Education Department of New Taipei City government under the commission of the Ministry of Education (Ou, 2016). The textbooks are reviewed by the MOE and the National Academy for Educational Research before being published by the MOE (MOE, 2019). Each textbook comes with a corresponding manual for teachers, which is composed based on the guidelines to provide specific teaching contents and instructions on how to conduct the lesson.

Besides the above-mentioned data, informal conversations and personal interactions outside the classrooms were used for reference in the analysis. All the data, including the recordings and pictures, were collected with the participants’ and the schools’ consent. This paper presents the names of the individual participants (teachers and students) and the schools with pseudonyms.

5. Teachers’ interpretations and their teaching practice

This study is part of a larger project investigating the trajectory of NIL education implementation from the curricular guidelines and teaching material development to classroom practice. Building on a previous analysis of official discourse on new immigrants’ language and culture in national curricular guidelines and textbooks (Kasai, 2022), this article focuses on how the local NIL teachers’ interpretation of and reaction to the officially envisaged image of new immigrants influence their teaching.

The previous study shows that the teaching materials published by MOE depict the Southeast Asian languages and cultures 1) as a medium of interaction at home and in the classroom, 2) as exotic foreign cultures and 3) as part of multicultural Taiwan (Kasai, 2022). Here, we take these three representations of the languages and cultures of new immigrants to examine how the teachers encounter and mediate the official discourse embedded in the teaching materials.

5.1. The Burmese class

First, despite claims in the formal curriculum for the value of the Burmese language as a communicative tool, teacher A shared her doubts about the instrumental value of Burmese. According to her, Burmese is “non-marketable” for businesses because, in addition to the continuing social instability and poverty in Burma, there is still discrimination against ethnic Chinese. As an ethnically Chinese Burmese who grew up in Burma during the 1988 uprising, teacher A had to rely on her Mandarin ability to pursue a better life outside of the country. She considers Burmese a useful language neither for family communication in Taiwan nor for social and economic mobilisation. Her bitter memories of experiencing deprivation of educational access due to the lockdowns following the 1988 uprising, discrimination on the basis of her Chinese background, and her struggle in learning Chinese and adjusting to Taiwanese society to pursue her aspirations for a better life, reflect how her life has been impacted by the identity politics in both Burmese and Taiwanese society.

As a result, despite the manuals’ instruction to use interactive games to cultivate students’ communication skills in Burmese, she spent more time teaching the construction of the language and rational thinking skills, which were not written in the manuals. Her language teaching focuses on the nature of language as a social and historical product instead of its communicative usage, which is less relevant to the students in her eyes.

Additionally, in order to keep the lesson meaningful to her students’ experience and knowledge, she encouraged the students to express their opinions, comments or questions inside the classroom. Then, she used them as a cue to initiate conversations and dialogue to deepen the students’ understanding of Burmese culture and language, instead of following the manuals’ instructions about “cultural teaching”. For example, as a response to the students’ confusion about their different experiences with Burmese traditional food, teacher A explained the geographical differences in Burmese cuisine, which is not discussed in the teaching manuals, to help them understand why some students from Northern Burma and those from Southern Burma have different experiences with Burmese cuisine. Furthermore, she often referred to her own experience of life in Burma to give answers to the students’ questions, instead of relying on the dry and decontextualised textbook descriptions of cultural characteristics. For instance, when the class was discussing the weather in Taiwan and Burma in the winter, teacher A told a story about growing up in Burma as a child and being excited to see her white breath in the winter, which demonstrates how cold it is in Burma. Her attempts to incorporate her childhood experience of living in Burma into the lesson reflect her perspective on culture as something more than just a set of codes or practices.

Furthermore, while the manuals introduce the Burmese language and various cultural characteristics as reference points to encourage students to make comparisons between Burma and Taiwan, rather than highlighting the differences between the two countries, teacher A sought to draw on the students’ own experiences to help them understand their transnational identity. For instance, being aware that many of her students visit Burmese Town in New Taipei City to participate in the annual water festival held by Burmese immigrants, teacher A decided to teach the original water festival in Burma to explain the difference between that and the Taipei variant. This attempt exemplifies how, rather than dichotomising Burmese and Taiwanese cultures as the textbook does, teacher A seeks to relate aspects of Burmese culture to the students’ own experience in Taiwan. In fact, because the class was conducted almost exclusively in Chinese, and because all the students are Taiwan-born Burmese who are ethnically Chinese, their Burmese learning constantly drew on comparisons with their lived experiences in Taiwan.

By counterposing Burma to Taiwan, textbook authors and curriculum developers aspire to teach students to have an “international perspective” and to become respectful of different cultures. However, such a simplistic juxtaposition of “Burmese” and “Taiwanese” cultures depicts Burma as an exotic foreign land in a way that does not align with the teacher’s experience. In the interview, she explained that she does not identify herself with Burmese culture and instead sees herself as an ethnic Chinese who belongs wholly neither to Burma nor Taiwan. In other words, the manuals’ discourse where Burmese culture is depicted in monolithic and stereotypical terms as something exotic and alien from Taiwanese culture does not coincide with either teacher A’s experience or identity, or those of her students. Teacher A’s reality of living as an ethnic Chinese Burmese is erased in this version of multiculturalism, which imagines cultural differences in terms of discreet, mutually exclusive, essentialised categories. This also suggests the two different discourses of Burma—one that illustrates Burma as foreign “other” and the other that portrays it as a heritage link to Taiwanese multicultural citizens—are present in the formal curriculum. The latter operates to reduce the complicated and fluid transnational experience of a new immigrant to a neat, self-contained cultural category, a representation of new immigrants that is better suited for the Taiwanese multicultural agenda.

5.2. The Malay class

Teacher B viewed her Malay class as a place where she can express her pride in and appreciation for the Malaysian culture and society she had once had to abandon. “I was thinking, I have learned Malay for 20 years, but I cannot use Malay. This [using Malay] is also one of my obligations, my value, but I had to put aside my value [when I moved to Taiwan]”. She explained that teaching Malay is her way to give back to her family, her teachers and everyone in Malaysia who has supported her in the past. Through teaching Malay, she has reconnected to her roots as a Malaysian and come to reaffirm her cultural background again, which strengthened her sense of Malaysian identity.

In the interview, teacher B expressed that her class represents her country, and as a NIL teacher, she must “try our [my] best to let the students … know my country, to learn my country”. Her understanding of the primary role of Malay language teachers, to teach about Malaysia, implies a neat dichotomy between Malaysia and Taiwan. In fact, teacher B seldom refers to any cultural or social practices practised among Malaysian communities or Malaysian immigrants living in Taiwan. It seems that anything lying beyond the borders of the prescribed nation, such as the experience of Malaysian immigrants outside Malaysia, is considered less relevant to the class.

This further implies that teacher B perceives the value of her Malaysian background based on its effective usage in classroom practice. Such interpretation has not only affected teacher B’s self-perception but also her understanding of other Malaysian immigrants. For instance, teacher B’s attempt to empower the Malaysian students to be proud of their cultural background was justified by the idea that their cultural ties can help other Taiwanese students learn about Malaysia. This practice illustrates that the appropriation of Malaysian immigrants’ culture for Taiwanese social benefit is internalised by teacher B and reinforced through her practice to empower the other Malaysian students. In other words, teacher B’s interpretation of her cultural background presupposes the social structure in the school community where the value of immigrant teachers’ cultural background is reduced to its contribution to the school or Taiwanese society.

Furthermore, teacher B developed her way of using Malaysian culture as a “reward” to motivate students’ language learning. She explained, “I tell them [the students], you have to do it [the learning exercises] fast, then I will give you some experience, cultural experience, and then they feel very happy”. Most of the cultural activities she offers to the students are not included in the manual. Nonetheless, she introduced various cultural activities, such as playing traditional Malaysian board games, and musical instruments and cooking and eating local food. Her usage of cultural content as an entertaining reward leads to selective teaching of Malaysian culture. Her attempt to introduce an entertaining cultural experience attracted not only the students in her class but also many other students from the school. In addition, her teaching style also received considerable attention from the manuals’ editing committee. Teacher B is now voluntarily involved in the committee for developing teaching methods for NIL education.

While such teaching was effective in motivating students’ Malay learning and gaining acknowledgement from the school, the usage of Malaysian culture as a “reward” implies the sifting of cultural experience to select its most entertainingly exotic features. This accentuates the portrayal of Malaysia as an “exotic other”. As a consequence, the teaching manuals’ portrayal of Malaysia as an exotic, alien, “foreign” society is maintained or reinforced through her classroom practice, although she gave less attention than envisaged in the textbook to the discussion of differences between Malaysian and Taiwanese culture.

In regard to the language itself, her view of Malay aligned well with the discourse of the manuals, which perceives it as a communication medium for everyday interaction at home and in the classroom. She emphasised in the interview that in her teaching, she focuses on enhancing students’ communication skills in Malay through interactive activities. She often brought in alphabet cards, vocabulary cards, picture cards, books, board games and arts and crafts materials for these learning activities. Her perspective on ideal language teaching as an entertaining experience corresponded well with the manuals’ intention to nurture students’ active communication skills in Malay through participatory activities. This further implies the impact of teacher B’s self-perception as a NIL teacher on his or her interpretation of the national discourse.

Overall, her acceptance of the national discourse exemplifies her strategy to mobilise Malaysian immigrants’ position in Taiwan by promoting an exotic Malaysian image through classroom teaching to gain social recognition. The implications of these ideologies, interpretations and classroom practices for new immigrants will be discussed next.

6. Rethinking new immigrant language education as a site for social transformation

The teachers’ teaching styles illuminate how NIL teaching is shaped by their interpretations of the culture and language based on their experiences as Southeast Asian immigrants. In other words, whether intentionally or not, the classroom is determined by the NIL teachers’ “differentiated experience” reciprocally interacting with the official discourse on new immigrants that is partly a product of the identity politics in Taiwan. We argue that there is potential here to rethink language teaching.

In the realm of critical multiculturalism, there has been a call for including minorities in processes of democratic decision-making to reconstruct society (Kubota, 2010; Young, 1990). When the attempts of new immigrants to construct their own discourse is confined to the private sphere, their scope for challenging hegemonic social structures is likely to remain insignificant. The introduction of NIL into Taiwan’s formal school curriculum and recruiting new immigrants as public teachers made it possible for them to bring “differentiated” experiences and voices into the classroom. The new policy gave them opportunities, beyond or outside the constraints of established gender roles or family politics, to confront, interpret and react to official discourse about themselves.

For instance, the case study of the Burmese lesson shows how an ethnically Chinese Burmese woman, who is sceptical of the official discourse that portrays the Burmese language as linguistic capital, conducts classroom teaching about the Burmese language and culture. Her teaching, which focused less on sets of cultural practices and language usage and more on the everyday experiences of the students as someone with Burmese roots, reflected her perspective on the cultural background of the Burmese immigrants. As an ethnic Chinese, the Burmese teacher saw more value in making sense of their transnational experiences and feeling connected with those with similar backgrounds than in gaining Burmese proficiency which she saw as useless in the global market. This also testifies to the absence in formal curricular discourse of perspectives reflecting the experience of ethnically Chinese individuals among Southeast Asian immigrants.

In the case of the Malay teacher, she interpreted official discourse, which emphasises the economic and cultural value of the Malay language and culture, as positive government recognition of her value as a Malay language teacher. By perceiving the discourse as legitimate support from the MOE, she integrated various cultural practices into her classroom teaching as much as she could to promote Malaysian culture to Taiwanese society. In both cases, the NIL teachers encountered the ideologies incorporated into the formal curriculum, interpreted, adjusted, and delivered them in a form of classroom teaching.

6.1. The structural factors that facilitated/constrained the teaching

6.1.1. Teachers’ autonomy

What facilitated such teaching practice, is partly the freedom and autonomy given to the teachers in the classroom. Although there are manuals that provide “recommended” instructions, they do not entail any assessment. The teachers have full freedom to decide their teaching methods, as long as they cover the vocabulary and phrases prescribed in the teacher’s manuals. In addition, the fact that the NIL is not a “core subject”, which is required for entering junior high school, freed the teachers from pressures to prepare the students for examinations. This enabled them to be flexible with their teaching, valuing their pedagogic beliefs and reflecting on their own prior experience as new immigrants.

6.1.2. Social structure of a school

At the same time, this study reveals how the new immigrant’s identity negotiation is still widely constrained by the social structure inside the schools. As a national institution, the school community functions to implicitly steer the NIL teachers’ usage of their cultural ties for national interest to cultivate students with cross-cultural abilities. The case of the Malay class, in particular, implies the success of a new immigrant as a teacher is dependent on their meaningful usage of their cultural ties; together with their time, energy and money for constructing the image of their “home country” that would please the students and the other school staff. In fact, her approach of providing various exotic cultural experiences as an entertainment reward gained considerable attention from the editing committee of the NIL education and lead her to become the volunteer advisor. Following the example set by teacher B, NIL teachers may find pathways to gain public acknowledgement that is limited to appropriating their cultural ties for Taiwanese benefit. Additionally, a structural pressure to compete for students against other “native language” courses could potentially reinforce a tendency among NIL teachers to embrace the official curricular representation of their identities and fuel efforts to represent their cultures as exotic and/or entertaining. Most public-schools allot native languages one period each in the same time slot. Therefore, the students are only allowed to select one language for the course. NIL teachers not only have to compete against “native languages” but also have to vie with other NIL to gain a large number of students. Such pressure may spur new immigrants to turn to their cultural ties for upward mobilisation in their career, as a teacher.

6.1.3. Teacher professionalism

The discussion can be further extended to the role a teacher’s professionalism plays in integrating new immigrants into Taiwanese society. For instance, compared to teacher A, teacher B was more conscious of her responsibility as a language teacher. Additionally, her view towards the primary role of a NIL teacher, to teach students about her “home country”, seemed to shape her classroom practice and her identity as a Malay immigrant. On the other hand, teacher A focused more on incorporating the students’ experience as second-generation Burmese in Taiwan into the classroom teaching. The case of teacher B illuminates how public teachers are incorporated into the broader social structure for cultivating future citizens. For this very reason, when teachers internalise the official idea of new immigrants’ cultural values, their teaching practices may further enhance the appropriation of new immigrants for the benefit of Taiwan. Consequently, depicting languages as a foreign other furthers the “us” versus “them” dichotomy and diverges from creating a multicultural Taiwan.

7. Conclusion

With the aim of exploring ways of rethinking the value of language education that extend beyond its instrumental role in promoting communication, this study discussed the possible impact NIL education could have on new immigrants’ position in Taiwan’s increasingly multicultural society. The findings suggest that despite the structural constraints within the school, the ideology implemented by the language policy and planning are also instantiated, interpolated, taken up, performed, or resisted at individual and institutional (school and community) levels when the cultural-linguistic minorities are integrated in the formal school system. This is significant for new immigrants, whose negotiation ground for identity has been previously limited to the private sphere where their gender role intersects with their ethnic and class identity. Furthermore, systematic barriers need to be removed to allow new immigrants to participate in the knowledge-construction process. A more holistic understanding of the cultural significance of NIL education entails inquiring into the multilingual situation within the schooling system, identity discourse in the formal curriculum, NIL teacher’ experience outside school, and the broader evolution of identity politics in Taiwan.

Ethical approval

The research was confirmed by the Research Ethics Committee of the National Taiwan Normal University.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the participants for taking part in this research. We are also thankful to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback. We also would like to thank Professor Edward Vickers for his insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number [JP22KJ2386].

Notes

1. Minnanese, also known as Taiwanese, Hoklo, or Hokkien refers to the Han Chinese from Fujian Province who migrated to Taiwan during the Dutch colonial period and the period of Qing Dynasty rule. As the largest ethnic group in Taiwan, their language is spoken by 68% of the Taiwanese population (Chen, 2010, 93).

2. Mainlanders (waishengren) refers to the descendants of the soldiers and refugees who arrived in Taiwan with the KMT regime (Chen, 2010, 83).

3. The Hakka are an ethnic group from China, who are often associated with a long history of migration both within the mainland China and across the sea (Hakka Affairs Council [HAC], 2018). Many Hakka in Taiwan migrated from Fujian, Guangdong, Jiangxi provinces before the arrival of Minnanese.

4. Indigenous peoples are the ethnically Austronesian aboriginal population of Taiwan. Although depicted as one group in this context, today there are 16 distinct Indigenous tribes recognised by the Taiwanese government (MOA, 2021).