As one of pivotal intercultural practices, multilingual curricula have been promoted and implemented in many societies nowadays (Senar, Janés, Huguet & Ubalde, 2023; European Commission, n.d.). And in East Asian societies like Singapore, Hong Kong, and Philippines, employ distinct multilingual education strategies shaped by colonial histories and ethnic diversity (Goh, 2010; Leung & Li, 2020; Dumanig, David, & Symaco, 2012; Tupas & Martin, 2017). In Taiwan, the legislation of “Development of National Language Act” in 2019 has formally entered a new era of multicultural recognition, legally elevating the status of local languages, such as indigenous languages, Hakka, Taiwanese, Matsu dialect, and Taiwan Sign Language to that of "national languages". This legislative milestone mandated the inclusion of these languages as compulsory courses in the K-12 curriculum, extending instruction into junior and senior high schools starting from the 2022 academic year. However, this "multilingual turn" has coincided with the advanced promotion of the "Bilingual 2030" policy, which privileges English as a primary instrument for national competitiveness. This study argues that the simultaneous enactment of these divergent policies, one rooted in cultural transitional justice and the other in global economic instrumentalism, has created a stratified linguistic hierarchy. While English keeps being framed as a "resource" for global mobility, local languages remain positioned as heritage artifacts. Through a structural analysis of policy documents and qualitative interviews with teachers, this paper utilizes the theoretical metaphor of "Multilingual Islands" (Jordens et al., 2018) to depict how local language education is spatially and structurally contained within the "monolingual sea" of Mandarin dominant schooling. The "Multilingual Islands" framework posits that in educational systems dominated by a single hegemonic language (in Taiwan's case, Mandarin), minority languages (local languages) exist only within strictly demarcated spaces and times. On the one hand, these "islands" are the weekly 40-minute slots allocated for local language instruction. Outside these boundaries—in administration, other academic subjects, and campus rituals—the "sea" of Mandarin (and increasingly English) prevails, rendering the local language invisible and functionally irrelevant to the broader school ecology. On the other hand, from the perspective of human infrastructure, the metaphor of these islands reveals the status of local language teachers, a cohort of teachers who are legally identified as “Teaching Support Teachers". Unlike formal and full-time teachers who are rooted in the school community, these local language teachers must travel constantly between multiple schools to accumulate enough teaching hours to survive, which prevents them from establishing meaningful connections with students or the school administration.

Connell (2007) advocated in her work that non-Western countries should consider breaking away from Western research agendas in academic inquiry. From the perspective of "Southern Theory," she suggests moving beyond the role of being a mere "theory testing ground" for Northern countries. Kuan-Hsing Chen (2010) also called upon the academic community to conceptualize "Asia as Method" as a means of decolonization and de-imperialization in scholarship. Regarding the development of academic modernity, Ruey-Lin Chen (2017) attempted to answer an intriguing question: "Can there be a Taiwan Theory? How is it possible?" The possibility of regional theory is built upon the construction of researchers, research communities, and even research networks. Through a psychological sense of belonging, connections with other community members, and further participation and investment, mutual recognition among members is eventually created, thereby establishing an identity for regional theory. This study employs snowball sampling to recruit participants who have previously taught or are currently teaching local language courses in elementary, junior high, or senior high schools (both academic and vocational). To maximize the diversity and heterogeneity of the sample, stratified purposeful sampling are utilized to include various professional backgrounds, such as pre-service teachers, trainees, certified teachers, non-certified or part-time teachers, and Teaching Support Teachers. Participants contribute their relevant experiences and insights through interviews or by sharing pertinent documentary materials, based on their personal preference. The paper takes upon Ball, Maguire and Braun’s (2012) view of policy spaces among different levels of enactment and delineates the enacting of such language policy from the perspectives of situated contexts, professional cultures, material contexts, and external factors. The interviews focus on the participants' professional development, employment history, and pedagogical perspectives within the field of local language education. Each interview takes around 45-60 minutes. And the interview data is collected and transcribed into texts and analysed with the documents distributed in schools, such as language course surveys, flyers, and parent consent forms, etc.

While the law promises equal status for languages, the state has not established a corresponding full-time employment system for its teachers. The majority of local language instructors are not formal teachers who work full time in schools, but as Teaching Support Teachers. Because individual schools rarely offer enough local language classes to support a full-time position, local language teachers must "hop" between islands (schools) to stitch together a living wage. This mobility prevents them from the ecology of the school, excluding them from professional learning communities (PLCs), staff meetings, and the informal interactions that are crucial for pedagogical integration. However, while there are structural limitations, local language teachers has developed strategies that not only successfully put local language courses into practice but also exercise their teaching agency, such as flexibly conducting translanguaging, moving between Mandarin and the local languages, even English language, to scaffold students’ language learning. While policymakers may view this as a failure of implementation, this study reinterprets it as a necessary pedagogical adaptation. The structural analysis reveals that the current implementation of Development of National Language Act has created multilingual islands in the monolingual sea. However, to enhance a meaningful multilingualism in Taiwan requires transition from the goal of preserving languages on isolated islands to revitalizing them within a living ecosystem. Start from the specific social, historical, and policy contexts of Taiwan’s local language education, this study explores the unique circumstances and professional characteristics of local language teachers, which makes critical contributes to societies that are currently developing their own educational localization and local language policies.

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