In Taiwan, every elementary school student has the option to choose a Southeast-Asian language to study, but books to help preschoolers learn have long been a rarity.

“Back then I actually brought teaching materials from Vietnam,” says Nguyen Thi Lien Huong, a veteran Vietnamese teacher at National Taiwan University. A mother of three, she has lived in Taiwan for 22 years now. When she wanted to teach her young children her language, she found Taiwan to be lacking in appropriate resources and had to figure out a solution herself.

Ye Yu-ching, a professor in the Department of Early Childhood Education at National Chiayi University, believes that family is the source of one’s native tongue and that strong home education can profoundly impact children’s lives.

Seven languages

Due to the lack of language books for the children of Southeast-Asian immigrants, in 2016 the Ministry of Education commissioned National Chiayi University (NCYU) to develop and compile a series of books en­titled “Family Education in Southeast-Asian Languages.” The resulting 30 books in three sets cover Burmese, Cambodian, Filipino, Indo­nesian, Malay, Thai, and Vietnamese, giving mothers who speak these languages a new option for teaching their children.

“There have been official ‘multicultural teaching materials,’ but they were more like textbooks,” says project leader Professor Yeh Yu-ching of the Department of Early Childhood Education at NCYU. Yeh headed up a large team to complete this endeavor, with the primary aim of providing materials for children from under one to eight years old. The resulting books are bilingual and available in both physical and electronic versions, with the latter accompanied by online quizzes and standard pronunciation recorded by real people, providing a thorough and considered offering.

Nguyen Thi Lien Huong, a Vietnamese teacher at National Taiwan University, recommends the “Family Education in Southeast-Asian Languages” books as a way for immigrant mothers to teach their own languages to their children earlier through enjoyable parent–child time.

The “Family Education in Southeast-Asian Languages” series is designed like other picture books for children, with each book telling a story that will enrapture its young readers.

Combined language and picture books

Yeh’s vision also had the materials double as picture books that parents could use with their children at home, since “what we call your ‘mother tongue’ is the language you learn naturally in the home.” Unlike staid textbooks, these books engage children with cute illustrations and vibrant stories. “Mothers can read them together with their kids, sharing the joy of reading and engaging them in dialogue.”

To make the books the best they could be, Yeh invited Ho Hsiang-ju of NCYU’s Department of Early Childhood Education and Shen Mei-yi of Southern Taiwan University of Science and Technology’s Department of Child Care and Education to serve as editors. In addition to the content written by experts from the Department of Early Childhood Education, Yeh also invited native speakers recommended by the National Immigration Agency and Radio Taiwan International to form a team of consultants from seven countries to ensure the correctness of that content. The exquisite illustrations accompanying the teaching materials were created by picture-book artists Bernie Lin and Mig Jou. With their cute little bunnies, “Mr. Lion,” and various other animals, they are endlessly appealing to young children.

Immigrant parents take part in a storytelling group to learn about the content of the teaching materials and how to teach with them. (courtesy of Yeh Yu-ching)

Making education entertaining

The books increase in difficulty as readers progress, applying theories of childhood linguistic development. The first set of books focuses on things like words for parts of the body, numbers, family life, interacting with nature, greeting elders, having breakfast at home, mom cooking eggs in the kitchen, and going to play in the park. The second set helps children build longer sentences, developing their language skills through repeated sentence structures and the use of onomatopoeia, and the third set is suitable for children from the age of five to second grade. As the books progress, they not only increase in vocabulary difficulty, but also in the amount of cultural context and awareness involved, for example, talking about Indonesian cakes made with pandan leaves, games played in Southeast Asia, and so on.

The design of these teaching materials incorporates many ingenious touches, such as the addition of a number of small games. For example, parents can do role-plays with their kids, pretending to be rabbits, birds, and butterflies, or they can use everyday household items like laundry baskets and bath towels to play games with the children.

Correction after correction

According to Yeh Yu-ching, compiling 30 books in seven languages was an arduous process. As Southeast-­Asian languages use either Latin script or one of their own, the content written in them was unintelligible to the Taiwanese editors. What looked like completely ordinary typesetting to them, however, could have the native-­speaker consultants up in arms, so they had to work to correct any punctuation or line-break errors.

As a member of the editorial committee, Nguyen Thi Lien Huong was responsible for reviewing and recording some of the Vietnamese versions of the books. She tells of the endless stream of meetings during the editing process. “The recordings alone were changed so many times; it was tough work.” Due to the tremendous differences in grammar and culture between the different countries, the first drafts, translations, illustrations, and recordings had to be constantly revised, with native-language experts invited to do the review and revision.

The stories told in the “Family Education in Southeast-Asian Languages” books are linked to the cultures of the countries that speak the seven languages covered and the lives of immigrants from them, thus combining children’s literature with practical language education.

Small changes, bigger connections

Having a set of books about one’s native language while living in a foreign land can be very meaningful to mothers who hail from abroad. As a result, many such mothers have signed up for sharing sessions with parent groups that promote these teaching materials. Kindergarten teacher Li Yung-en, who organized one such session for a group of parents in Taoyuan, saw a father on a scooter bringing his wife and son to join in, with the wife beyond excited about reading the books to their child as soon as they got them. “The mothers were really enthusiastic and every single one of the Indonesian-language books we had on hand was gone by the end!” Li recalls.

One mother also told Yeh Yu-ching that after she brought the books home, her child got so rowdy pestering her to hear the stories that they would go off upstairs to read them, which got the father curious, resulting in storytime becoming valued family time.

Southeast-Asian immigrants are important members of Taiwanese society. This picture shows women performing traditional dances from their home countries at a market held by the Juridical Association for the Development of Women’s Rights in Pingtung.

A window on the world

“Family is the source of one’s native language and is crucial to children’s linguistic development.” In the course of a six-year research project, Yeh found that many mothers from Southeast Asia had vocabulary issues when trying to interact with their children in Chinese. “Having to use an unfamiliar language, many of them rely on short imperative sentences with little variation in vocabulary, and this has a negative impact on their children’s performance in their second-grade Mandarin test.”

That being so, Yeh hopes that mothers can spend more time with their children and give them more linguistic stimulation. “Five minutes a day reading with your child can have a long-term positive impact on their growth.”

Nguyen Thi Lien Huong recommends starting to read with your children as soon as you can. “Studies have found that children start learning language while still in the womb, so why not start reading these books to them when pregnant?” She also notes that when children learn their mother’s language, their mother should remember to give them plenty of praise, as this will help them really enjoy learning it.

The Taiwanese government has been promoting the learning of Southeast-Asian languages to showcase Taiwan’s tolerant, self-assured multiculturalism. In the future, Southeast-Asian languages may not only be the family languages of immigrants and their children but also a linguistic option for all Taiwanese children beyond English. They can help open a window on the world for children, teaching them how different cultures can live and prosper together and how to build a society that accepts everyone.