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Tainan Trashes Its Garbage Truck Classroom

Well, a short-lived English-teaching phenomenon is over, at least for the moment. It was in the news today that Tainan City garbage trucks had, six months ago, suspended indefinitely their broadcasts of English lessons. "The city government decided to temporarily suspend the service because it has so many other policies it needs to deliver to residents," said Environmental Bureau Chief Chang Huang-chen, as quoted in the Taiwan News (September 6, 2008). Well, considering that nobody could ever really evaluate the effectiveness of the service, it seems appropriate that the mobile loudspeakers now carry warnings of health problems in Vietnamese and Thai "for the benefit of foreign spouses who do not understand Chinese." Tainan City has, according to the news article, recently been struggling with a spreading crsis of dengue fever and enterovirus. In these circumstances, I think we can forgive the bureau's decision to "trash" the city's "English Time."

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