An Analysis of Taiwan Dialect Education on Southern Min, in Keelung and Taipei Area: a Sociolinguistic Point of View

• Main Authors: Chien Hsiao-Kuang, 簡孝光
• Other Authors: Joseph H.Hsu
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2008
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/81072340123973712452

碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 語言學研究所 === 96 === This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of dialect education policy from the view of students’ contact frequency of Southern Min, their language proficiency, and their attitude toward Southern Min. Through questionnaire survey and statistic analysis from three different age groups (junior high school students, college and university students, and general public), we can see that dialect education failed to increase students’ Southern Min proficiency and contact frequency. What’s worse, more students begin to dislike Southern Min than like it. And they don’t wish to have Southern Min classes in junior and senior high school. Another way to evaluate the policy is through language planning. According to Rubin(1971), there are four steps of language planning, including: fact-finding, planning, implementation, and feedback. In the case of dialect education in Taiwan, we can find that there are flaws in all the steps: no fact-finding, not careful planning, too many revisions in implementation, and the feedback system has not been established. The third way of examining the policy is to analyze from three subdivisions of dialect education: corpus planning, status planning, and acquisition planning. After a careful examination, it shows that both corpus planning and acquisition planning have serious problems. After all the above analysis, three conclusions are drawn: 1. Dialect education failed to increase the contact frequency, Southern Min ability, or the user population in junior high school students. 2. Dialect education is not successful in arousing students’ interest, and neither is it successful in arousing the public of its value toward Southern Min. 3. Southern Min is declining from generation to generation.