Guowen teacher qualifications: another aspect of Taiwan's post-war literacy crisis

Much of the "blame" for Taiwanese students' problems learning Guoyu was often placed on the fifty years that Taiwanese were separated from the "fatherland" or on the influence of Japanese. From a different angle, the teachers themselves were part of the problem.

Liang Rongruo (梁容若), a scholar involved with the Guoyu Ribao and a Chinese dept. professor at Tunghai from 1957 until 1969, wrote in 1955 about the problem regarding the training of secondary school Guowen teachers. He pointed out that many secondary school Guowen teachers were not trained in Chinese, but rather had studied subjects like political science, history, economics, and law. So Guowen classes ended up discussing those topics rather than what students were supposed to be learning, such as training in Guoyu, grammar, style, and the "dissection" of essays--things that the teachers themselves had never studied (13).

In addition, teachers in the primary and secondary schools came from all over China and often brought with them the dialects of their home provinces. Not only was their Guoyu sometimes hard to understand, a student might even experience having his or her "standard" Guoyu pronunciation "corrected" according to the teacher's "nonstandard" accent, says Liang (13).

Liang regarded the teaching of Guowen as a profession that required professional knowledge, just as teachers of chemistry or physics needed training in those subjects (14).

Source: Liang Rongruo 梁容若. "Ruhe Gaijin Zhongxue de Guowen Jiaoxue" 如何改進中學的國文教學. Zhongdeng Jiaoyu 中等教育 6.2 (1955). Rpt. in Guoyu yu Guowen 國語與國文. 2nd ed. Taipei: Guoyu Ribao She, 1969. 13-18.