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Chapter Title Bilingual Education in the People’s Republic of China
Copyright Year 2015
Copyright Holder Springer International Publishing Switzerland
Corresponding Author Family Name Gao
Particle
Given Name Xuesong
Given Name Andy
Suffix
Division/Department Division of English Language
Education
Organization/University The University of Hong Kong
Street Room 705, Meng Wah Complex
City Pokfulam
State Hong Kong SAR
Country People’s Republic of China
Email xsgao@hku.hk
Author Family Name Wang
Particle
Given Name Weihong
Suffix
Division/Department Faculty of Education (Division of
English Language Education)
Organization/University China University of Geosciences
City Wuhan
Country People’s Republic of China
Email wangwhw@connect.hku.hk
Abstract This chapter focuses on bilingual education programs in the People’s
Republic of China, including those for ethnic minorities and Chinese-
English bilingual education programs. Bilingual education programs for
ethnic minorities aim at developing minority students’literacy in national
standard Chinese (the official language) and one ethnic minority
language. Chinese-English bilingual education programs advocate using
both national standard Chinese and English in teaching subject courses.
This chapter outlines the developmental processes of these bilingual
education programs and identifies challenges that may undermine their
growth. By analyzing their origins, aims, and approaches, this chapter
speculates about these bilingual education programs’future development
in China AU1.
BookID 318385_0_En__ChapID _Proof# 1 - 29/3/16
1Bilingual Education in the People’s Republic
2of China
3Xuesong Andy Gao and Weihong Wang
4Contents
5Early Developments .. . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . 2
6Bilingual Education for Ethnic Minorities .. . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . 3
7Major Contributions and Work in Progress . . ................................................ 3
8Problems and Difficulties..... ............................................ .................... 4
9Chinese-English Bilingual Education .. . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . 6
10 Major Contributions and Work in Progress . . ................................................ 6
11 Problems and Difficulties..... ............................................ .................... 8
12 Future Directions .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
13 Cross-References .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
14 References .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . 11
15 Abstract
16 This chapter focuses on bilingual education programs in the People’s Republic of
17 China, including those for ethnic minorities and Chinese-English bilingual edu-
18 cation programs. Bilingual education programs for ethnic minorities aim at
19 developing minority students’literacy in national standard Chinese (the official
20 language) and one ethnic minority language. Chinese-English bilingual education
21 programs advocate using both national standard Chinese and English in teaching
22 subject courses. This chapter outlines the developmental processes of these
23 bilingual education programs and identifies challenges that may undermine
X.A. Gao (*)
Division of English Language Education, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong
SAR, People’s Republic of China
e-mail: xsgao@hku.hk
W. Wang
Faculty of Education (Division of English Language Education), China University of Geosciences,
Wuhan, People’s Republic of China
e-mail: wangwhw@connect.hku.hk
#Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015
O. Garcia et al. (eds.), Bilingual and Multilingual Education,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-02324-3_16-1
1
24 their growth. By analyzing their origins, aims, and approaches, this chapter
25 speculates about these bilingual education programs’future development in China AU1.
26 Early Developments AU2
27 The picture of bilingual education in the People’s Republic of China (hereafter
28 China) is complex since China has an overall population of 1.3 billion people,
29 which consists of 56 ethnic groups, and also a highly heterogeneous linguistic
30 context. The dominant Han (汉)-group comprises 91.5 % of the total population
31 and speaks nearly 2,000 distinct dialects or subdialects (Li 2006). The other 55 ethnic
32 minority groups, including Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur, and Zhuang, speak over
33 290 languages (Lewis 2009). This chapter focuses on bilingual education programs
34 for ethnic minority students and Chinese-English bilingual education ones being
35 promoted largely in China’s mainstream schools and universities.
36 The first type of bilingual education programs were part of a government-led
37 educational campaign at the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949
38 to provide education opportunities for ethnic minority groups (for a typology of
39 bilingual education for Chinese minorities, see Dai and Cheng 2007). These programs
40 aimed to develop ethnic minority students’bilingual competence in the national stan-
41 dard Chinese language (i.e., in its spoken form as Putonghua andinitswrittenformas
42 Standard Written Chinese) and their own ethnic languages. By doing so, it was hoped
43 that these ethnic minority students could be integratedintothemainstreamChinese
44 society and at the same time maintain their own cultural and linguistic integrity.
45 The rise of Chinese-English bilingual education happened after the implementa-
46 tion of the economic reform and open door policy in 1978. In the last few decades,
47 the learning of English has been seen as crucial for China’s economic development
48 and global engagement (Gao 2012). As English is taught as a school subject in a
49 context where real-life opportunities to use it are limited, there has been growing
50 dissatisfaction with the effectiveness of the traditional English language teaching. To
51 address the problem, a variety of initiatives have been undertaken, including English
52 immersion programs and the use of English as medium of instruction (MOI). Since
53 the national standard Chinese is the legally prescribed MOI, educational initiatives
54 that use English as a MOI are called “bilingual education”to stress the fact that
55 standard Chinese is also used so that they can gain tolerance from governments at
56 various levels. In 2001, the Ministry of Education (MOE) issued an official directive
57 which mandates 5–10 % of university courses should be offered in English (MOE
58 2001). Although this directive is only related to Chinese universities, it has been
59 widely seen as a policy that supports Chinese-English bilingual education (Yu 2008).
60 Subsequently, these initiatives to integrate the learning of English into the learning of
61 particular academic subjects, referred to as bilingual education in China, have been
62 growing rapidly across China and “bilingual education has become part of the
63 everyday vocabulary ... of educationists ... [and] ordinary people”(Feng 2005,
64 p. 530).
2 X.A. Gao and W. Wang
65 Bilingual Education for Ethnic Minorities
66 Major Contributions and Work in Progress
67 The development of bilingual education programs for ethnic minority students has
68 gone through different stages since 1949 (see Dai and Dong 2001 for a historical
69 review). After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the first consti-
70 tution in 1952 accorded equality to all ethnic groups and explicitly stated that,
71 “Every ethnic group has the freedom to use and develop its own language and
72 script”(cited in Lam 2005, p. 125). In light of such policy discourses, the use of
73 minority languages in education was protected and supported as a form of recogni-
74 tion of ethnic minorities’linguistic and cultural rights. A great number of linguistic
75 investigations were undertaken to codify, standardize, and develop ethnic minority
76 languages for education purposes from 1949 to 1957. Teaching materials were also
77 compiled in, or translated into, these newly codified minority languages so that
78 ethnic minority students could be educated in their own native languages. At this
79 time, bilingual education programs for ethnic minority students largely focused on
80 developing these students’competence in minority languages (Dai and Dong 2001).
81 During the tumultuous periods of the Great Leap Forward movement
82 (1958–1959) and the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), the national standard Chi-
83 nese was imposed on minority education with the intention to replace minority
84 languages in the bilingual programs so as to achieve quick “linguistic convergence”
85 and “ethnic amalgamation”(Zhou 2012). Minority languages were suppressed and
86 repudiated as “useless”and “backward”and the practices to educate in native ethnic
87 minority languages were transformed to monolingual Chinese education (Dai and
88 Dong 2001).
89 After the Cultural Revolution (from 1978 onwards), there was a revival of
90 bilingual education for ethnic minority students. Noticing the reluctance in promot-
91 ing ethnic languages during the first few years after the Cultural Revolution, Ma and
92 Dai (1980) openly argued for the significance of ethnic minority languages and
93 cultures in socialist development. They contended that bilingual education protected
94 minority students’linguistic and cultural rights, which was conducive to China’s
95 maintaining of ethnic unity and social stability as a nation. The 1982 Constitution,
96 thus, reaffirmed the lawful rights of minority groups to use and develop their own
97 languages and cultures. The 1984 Law on Regional Autonomy for Minority Nation-
98 alities and the 1986 Compulsory Education Law of the People’s Republic of China
99 also explicitly stipulated the rights for minority students to receive education in their
100 own native languages. With the endorsement of legislation, the development and
101 trial use of ethnic written languages was restored in many minority autonomous
102 regions and large-scale experiments in bilingual teaching were conducted in schools
103 for ethnic minority students. By 1985, 2.5 million students and 160,000 schools were
104 engaged in bilingual education (Lin 1997). Translated minority language textbooks
105 amounted to 1800 sets and 80 million volumes by 1991 (Lin 1997).
106 However, since Putonghua became widely accepted as “the common language
107 for economic and cultural exchanges and everyday contacts among all peoples in
Bilingual Education in the People’s Republic of China 3
108 China”(Dai and Dong 2001, p. 36), and further acknowledged by laws as the
109 common speech for all ethnic groups in China, education for ethnic minority groups
110 did not tilt exclusively to either minority languages or Putonghua. Instead, bilingual
111 education programs emphasized the development of Min-Han Jiantong (民汉兼通)
112 bilinguals –the learning of the national Chinese language and one minority language
113 that was commonly used in ethnic minority regions or places to achieve fluency in
114 both the national and ethnic languages (Dai and Dong 2001).
115 Transitional bilingual education practices were documented in empirical studies
116 on the emergence of boarding schools for minority students (Chen 2008; Postiglione
117 et al. 2007) and the merge of minority mother tongue schools with Chinese schools
118 in the Xingjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (Ma 2009; Tsung and Cruickshank
119 2009). For example, Postiglione et al. (2007) studied the practice of neidiban (內地
120 班) schooling for secondary Tibetan students (sending Tibetan children to boarding
121 schools in inland China to cultivate Zang-Han Jiantong bilinguals
藏汉兼
通). Stud-
122 ies such as Wang (2011) and Tsung et al. (2012) examined the historical develop-
123 ment of bilingual education in the ethnic and culturally diversified province of
124 southwest Yunnan and reported on the impact of the rise of Chinese on bilingual
125 education. The study noted that there were many supportive language policies and
126 measures, such as the legitimation and promotion of bilingual literacy, the develop-
127 ment of bilingual curriculum, the bolstering of native language status in secondary
128 examinations, and the policy of rewarding bilingual teachers in the 1980s. These
129 policies help legitimate ethnic native languages in bilingual education and subse-
130 quently bilingual education had been well developed.
131 Problems and Difficulties
132 In spite of all the policy discourses, recent research has noted that bilingual education
133 programs for ethnic minority students underscore an effort to assimilate the minority
134 groups into the mainstream Chinese society. While analyzing problems encountered
135 by schools for ethnic minority students in implementing bilingual education pro-
136 grams, Lin (1997) found that inequalities in political and economic development of
137 different ethnic groups had led to the de facto marginalization of minority languages
138 in education even though minority languages were granted equal status with the
139 Chinese language by law. She reasoned that, in practice, standard Chinese was often
140 privileged as the official language commonly used in governments, education, and
141 many other public domains and was also frequently associated with opportunities
142 and social acceptance, whereas minority languages were limited in use and relegated
143 to low social status. The lack of social rewards for using minority languages led to
144 the depreciation of these languages by parents and local government officials.
145 Schools for ethnic minority students have been increasingly accommodated to
146 Putonghua schooling. Even though bilingual education is offered in primary
147 schools, it is often discontinued in secondary schools and universities. Postiglione
148 et al.’s(2007) study on Tibetan studies in neidiban schooling found that in the
149 program, the study of Chinese outweighed that of Tibetan. Tibetan study was
4 X.A. Gao and W. Wang
150 regarded as a minor subject and students’performance in Tibetan learning was not
151 valued in college admission selections. The overall outcome of neidiban schooling
152 was a loss or deterioration in Tibetan language skills among the graduates. Never-
153 theless, Tibetan language skills were important for them to understand their native
154 culture and work environment after their return to Tibet. As a result, they concluded
155 that the neidiban program did not produce Zang-Han Jiantong bilinguals. Instead, it
156 was subjugated to the political aim of creating a group of Tibetans who could
157 facilitate the assimilation of Tibetans into the Chinese society.
158 Bilingual education programs for ethnic minority students have also been
159 undermined with the rise of national standard Chinese as a symbol of unity for the
160 nation and an inclusive national identity for all Chinese citizens. In the last two
161 decades, the government has endorsed “an unbalanced bilingual ideology and a
162 structured language order where minorities are supposed to use Putonghua as the
163 primary language and their native language as the supplementary or transitional in
164 public domains”(Zhou 2012, p. 27). As a result, the status of Putonghua has been
165 tacitly elevated, whereas minority languages are relegated to simple symbols of
166 ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity to be managed. The elevated status of
167 Putonghua has been further bolstered by the implementation of market-oriented
168 economy reforms. A market economy encourages dramatic internal migration which
169 in turn creates a strong demand for a lingua franca to serve communication needs.
170 Putonghua has developed from “a state-endorsed language to one that is endorsed by
171 the state and empowered by the market”(ibid, p. 25).
172 Studies including Wang (2011) and Tsung et al. (2012) in Yunnan demonstrated
173 that various stakeholders’displayed “great Han mentality”and the “pragmatism
174 mentality.”As a result, popular beliefs favoring Putonghua for children’s academic
175 success and future job prospects marginalized ethnic languages as only a transitional
176 tool in the early few years of schooling to develop Chinese language literacy (also
177 see Tsung 2014). These studies suggest that China is heading in the direction of
178 emphasizing assimilation over harmonious diversity through minority education.
179 The studies also reveal an ongoing dilemma that the Chinese government faces in
180 appropriating ethnic diversity and national unity in its nation-building process.
181 China is now at a turning point that would lead to either interethnic conflict or
182 harmony. Studies have revealed that it is heading in the direction of emphasizing
183 assimilation over any acceptance of harmonious diversity (Postiglione 2014).
184 Postiglione (2014) argued that the increasing interethnic contacts that have been
185 the result of economic reforms, market forces, population flows, and the opening to
186 the outside world have brought fundamental changes to the nature of ethnic plural-
187 ism in China. The changing nature of ethnic pluralism has placed ethnic intergroup
188 relations at a crossroad. The country may move toward “plural monoculturalism”in
189 which “ethnic minority groups emphasize their cultural identities above those of the
190 nation and limit their potential to take on multiple roles in national development,”or
191 toward “harmonious multiculturalism”that would “align with the Confucian tradi-
192 tion of ‘harmonious yet different’and coincide with the state’s campaign for a
193 harmonious society”(Postiglione 2014, p. 43). It has become critical for the Chinese
194 government to maintain an optimal balance of its efforts to “foster cultural pluralism
Bilingual Education in the People’s Republic of China 5
195 and national stability through a shared sense of national belonging”(Leibold and
196 Chen 2014, p. 16).
197 Postiglione (2014) foregrounded the state education system as a key battlefield to
198 push Chinese society towards a harmonious multiculturalism, whereas bilingual
199 education as a critical device to promote cultural pluralism and ethnic tolerance.
200 He suggests that bilingual education programs should include not only the minorities
201 but also the mainstream Han community so that “positive values of pluralism and
202 integration should be simultaneously transmitted at the level of a common human
203 culture, the mainstream national culture and throughout multiple minority cultures”
204 (cited in Leibold and Chen 2014, p. 12). However, some preliminary attempts to
205 include the Han majority in multicultural education are reported to focus on “static
206 cultural artefacts without touching upon the deeper levels of understandings on
207 ethnicity and the majority-minority relations and therefore cannot create a truly
208 multicultural learning environment”(Zhang and Chen 2014, p. 400). It is unclear
209 how the Chinese government will take up the new challenge in promoting such
210 bilingual education.
211 Chinese-English Bilingual Education
212 Major Contributions and Work in Progress
213 Chinese-English bilingual education programs in mainstream schools and universi-
214 ties use both English and Chinese as MOI to teach subject or content courses. It is a
215 recent phenomenon rising from the Han majority group’s aspiration to “produce
216 bilinguals with a strong competence in mother tongue Chinese and a foreign
217 language, primarily English”(Feng 2005, p. 529). Chinese-English bilingual edu-
218 cation was initiated by a few well-equipped elite schools in the 1990s in response to
219 the mounting criticisms for the costly but ineffective English language programs in
220 the 1980s. Some of those early provisions of Chinese-English education include two
221 secondary-level bilingual science programs developed in Guangzhou and Shanghai
222 in 1993 and 1992, respectively, one primary-level program developed in Beijing,
223 and one China-Canada-United States English Immersion Programme (CCUEI)
224 developed collaboratively by university-based American, Canadian, and Chinese
225 language educators for selected kindergarten and primary school students in Xi’an in
226 1997. As pointed out by Hu (2007), virtually all schools involved in these programs
227 were well-resourced prestigious schools with “competent teaching staff,”“high-
228 caliber students,”and “long-established connections with domestic tertiary institu-
229 tions or overseas educational institutions”(p. 98). Those programs were largely
230 supported by overseas partners or staffed by native English speakers. These pro-
231 grams were reported to be successful and their successful stories have contributed to
232 a rise of interest in Chinese-English bilingual education.
233 The rising interest had been further fueled with the involvement of local govern-
234 ments in a few large urban centers, in particular the municipality of Shanghai
235 (Hu 2007). Inspired by the positive reports of the few elite bilingual education
6 X.A. Gao and W. Wang
236 programs, the Shanghai Education Commission started to encourage experimenta-
237 tion with bilingual instruction in the late 1990s. Initially, there were only eight
238 schools participating in the experiment in 2000. The directive of the MOE (2001)
239 enhanced the determination of the Education Commission to promote bilingual
240 education and expanded bilingual experiments to involve 100 schools in 2001,
241 around 30,000 students in 2002, 45,000 students in 260 schools in 2003, and
242 55,000 students in 2004 (Hu 2007). Other coastal cities immediately followed suit.
243 As Song and Yan (2004) reported, provincial education departments in Guangdong,
244 Liaoning, and Shandong soon proposed their own “100 bilingual education schools”
245 projects after Shanghai’s implementation of bilingual education. Many programs
246 were evaluated positively. For example, Wang (2003) reviewed five successful
247 bilingual programs carried out in Qingdao, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. In one
248 program, he reported that the group of Primary 6 students receiving bilingual
249 instruction not only outperformed their counterparts in English, Chinese, mathemat-
250 ics, natural science, and computer science but also outperformed two key Junior
251 Secondary 3 classes of students in English speaking, listening, and writing. The
252 successful bilingual education experiments in these big cities brought an upsurge of
253 bilingual programs across China. Many schools have jumped on the “bilingual
254 education”bandwagon and practiced varied forms of English-content integrated
255 teaching under the name of bilingual education, such as content-based language
256 teaching, English immersion, and English medium instruction (Hu 2007). The actual
257 use of the two languages in classroom instruction varies. Some use English as the
258 exclusive MOI. This is the case of the CCUEI programme in Xi’an (Qiang and
259 Siegel 2012). Most bilingual programs adopt a flexible combination of Chinese and
260 English in teaching and learning. Bilingual education research centers have been set
261 up in places like Shanghai, Liaoning, and Beijing. Bilingual education conferences
262 have been held regularly. For instance, National Conference on Bilingual Teaching is
263 held every 3 years. Online bilingual education platforms such as China Bilingual
264 Education Network (http://www.tesol.cn/) have also been built up to promote this
265 way of English teaching on a large scale.
266 Like bilingual education programs in primary and secondary schools, bilingual
267 education in higher education also originated in elite universities. To build a world-
268 class university, Tsinghua University recognized the importance of English and
269 introduced English medium instruction in the 1990s to provide an English learning
270 environment for its students (Pan 2006). Such practices had greatly facilitated the
271 development of Tsinghua’s joint international MBA programs, which were evalu-
272 ated as “having the most highly qualified faculty, the finest curriculum and the best
273 educational outcomes in China”(Pan 2006, p. 257). Encouraged by Tsinghua’s
274 success in MBA education, the state accepted English medium instruction for
275 university academic programs and recommended it to other universities nationwide
276 in the ministerial directive of 2001 (MOE 2001). The directive rationalized Chinese-
277 English bilingual education as a critical means to: (1) meet the needs of globalization
278 and economic growth, (2) cultivate international talents (Guojixing Rencai国际型人
279 才) or English-knowing professionals (Zhuanye Waiyu Fuhexing Rencai专业外语
280 复合型人才) for the twenty-first century, and (3) improve the quality of English
Bilingual Education in the People’s Republic of China 7
281 education and the overall quality of higher education. With government support,
282 other major universities also increased the provision of bilingual education. Bilin-
283 gual education had, thus, gained great momentum and expanded rapidly in most
284 Chinese universities in the last decade. A recent survey across China found that
285 132 out of the 135 universities investigated offered bilingual courses and/or pro-
286 grams, with an average of 44 courses per university (Wu et al. 2010).
287 Problems and Difficulties
288 Although English-Chinese bilingual education has been promoted at all educational
289 levels, it is beset with a number of controversies, which may undermine its devel-
290 opmental course. The prospect of these Chinese-English bilingual education pro-
291 grams is uncertain in China because there have not been satisfactorily definitive
292 answers to questions related to their legal status, social consequences, and pedagog-
293 ical effectiveness.
294 Despite support from the Chinese MOI, Chinese-English bilingual education
295 programs do not enjoy legal protection. The Language Law of People’s Republic
296 of China unequivocally stipulates that “schools and other institutions must use
297 Putonghua and standardized Chinese characters as the basic spoken and written
298 language in education and teaching”(cited in He 2011, p. 98). The flourishing
299 Chinese-English bilingual education programs are indicative of an educational
300 decentralization process that has been happening in China. They also reflect a
301 pragmatic attitude that the Chinese government adopts towards English and speak
302 for the efforts that the government is willing to undertake in appropriating the
303 language for its global engagement and economic development. However, it must
304 be noted that the national language policy has effectively “ruled out the possibility of
305 using English as the medium of instruction in schools as advocated by bilingual
306 education”and “bilingual education was not given any endorsement in the new
307 secondary curriculum”(He 2011, p. 99). This means that the government has the
308 flexibility of terminating Chinese-English bilingual education programs at any time
309 with full legal support.
310 The fact that Chinese-English bilingual education programs are still growing
311 rapidly in China suggest that the Chinese government is in a dilemma similar to
312 that of bilingual education programs for ethnic minorities. On the one hand, eco-
313 nomic growth emboldens China to be more assertive in its global participation. The
314 Chinese government aspires for exporting (zou chu qu
走
出
去
) its cultural products,
315 other than manufactured commodities, to overthrow the ideological and discursive
316 dominance of the west. The government is also keen in helping Chinese universities
317 internationalize themselves and recruit international students to counterbalance the
318 increasing number of Chinese students pursuing academic studies abroad. To
319 achieve these goals, the government needs English, the de facto international
320 language, to have their voices heard and respected as well as attract international
321 students to China. On the other hand, overreliance on English may undermine
322 China’s cultural identity, national security, and political stability. Meanwhile, the
8 X.A. Gao and W. Wang
323 rising importance of China demands the nation to promote the Chinese language to
324 be the next international language. The Chinese language and its culture are also
325 needed to unify the nation and its people (Zhou 2012). The government recently
326 initiated discussion on removing English from the national university matriculation
327 exams or reducing the weighting of it while increasing the weighting of Chinese
328 (Pan 2015). Though this does not necessarily mean that English is no longer seen as
329 an important language, it is suggestive of the Chinese government’s design to
330 confirm the unchallengeable status of the national standard Chinese for its rise to
331 be a new international language. Together with the reduction of teaching hours for
332 the subject of English in secondary curricula, these new initiatives can also be
333 considered significant policy signals, which portend a likely departure from the
334 policies on English provision that have been implemented since the late 1970.
335 They will profoundly influence the developmental course of Chinese-English bilin-
336 gual education programs.
337 In addition to the political and legal considerations, Chinese-English bilingual
338 education programs also have significant social consequences, about which
339 researchers have heated debates. Bilingual education programs have been associated
340 with an elitist origin since almost all of them were launched by well-resourced urban
341 schools in economically developed areas. The development of such bilingual edu-
342 cation programs may cause social divisions along the line of those “who have”and
343 “who have not”(Nunan 2003, p. 605). It may help “perpetuate and accentuate
344 educational inequalities in China by making [bilingual instruction] a service to the
345 privileged, the rich, and the elite”(Hu and Lei 2014, p. 564). Families with more
346 social and economic resources will invest heavily in helping their children access
347 bilingual education programs to acquire better English proficiency and achieve
348 upward social mobility. Children from families with limited social and economic
349 resources are left behind in the race for opportunities to pursue upward social
350 mobility, as English competence becomes “adefining characteristic of talents in
351 the 21st century”(Hu 2009, p. 52). The craze for Chinese-English bilingual educa-
352 tion also drives schools and educational authorities to divert limited resources to
353 acquire the infrastructure and English-competent teachers for the delivery of bilin-
354 gual education programs. Unless a school is well financed, such resource diversion is
355 likely to undermine the teaching and learning of other subjects. The massive
356 spending on Chinese-English bilingual education programs demands justification
357 in terms of their pedagogical effectiveness. There is a general lack of empirical
358 research on Chinese-English bilingual education and much of the extant research
359 lacks rigor. For instance, evaluation research has been conducted to examine the
360 effectiveness of Chinese-English bilingual education programs in China. While
361 these studies show that bilingual education apparently had a positive impact on
362 students’learning of English and other subjects, Hu (2007) argued that these studies
363 had been built on erroneous assumptions about language learning and cognitive
364 development. Those who advocate for bilingual education believe that bilingual
365 education programs would maximize students’exposure to English, which leads to a
366 better command of the language than those who do not access bilingual education
367 programs. However, the maximum exposure assumption is untenable as it is not the
Bilingual Education in the People’s Republic of China 9
368 quantity of exposure but the quality of students’engagement with English that
369 matters. The effectiveness of bilingual education programs was also undermined
370 by various contextual factors such as lack of trained teachers, inappropriate learning
371 materials, and students being unready for learning academic subjects in a medium
372 other than their first language (Cheng 2012;He2011). Though recent studies reveal
373 that bilingual education programs have positive effects on students’language learn-
374 ing and no negative impact on subject content learning (Cheng 2012; Cheng
375 et al. 2010), such findings can hardly justify the enormous financial investments
376 into these bilingual education programs. As acknowledged by Cheng et al. (2010),
377 other contextual factors such as social and economic ones might have influenced the
378 evaluation results. It has become imperative for rigorous empirical studies to be
379 conducted on these bilingual education programs in China so that they can provide a
380 solid knowledge base for policymaking. Furthermore, future research may benefit
381 from drawing theoretical input from recent research in multilingualism (García and
382 Li 2014; Lin 2015; Creese and Blackledge 2015). For instance, García and Li (2014)
383 proposed to reevaluate codeswitching in bilingual education through the lens of
384 translanguaging.
385 Future Directions
386 This chapter has outlined two major types of bilingual education in China. Bilingual
387 education programs for ethnic minority students are to develop Min-Han Jiantong –
388 bilinguals who have linguistic competence in both their native languages and the
389 national language of Chinese, whereas the Chinese-English bilingual education is to
390 educate Fuhexing Rencai, people who possess “both knowledge in specialized areas
391 and strong competence in a foreign language”(Feng 2007, p. 2). These two types of
392 bilingual education seem to be separate and exist in parallel in China, but are, in fact,
393 interconnected and mutually influential (Feng 2005,2007).
394 Through appropriating two languages in bilingual education programs, minority
395 students are expected to align with their own ethnic cultures and identities and, more
396 importantly, the national culture and identity. Chinese-English bilingual education
397 creates an effective way for participants to learn a foreign language while “has little
398 to do with cultural identity, but only concerns about language”(Wang 2003, p. 12).
399 In both types of bilingual education, students’right to be educated in their mother
400 tongue is protected by law, but at the same time, the right is blurred. In bilingual
401 education programs for ethnic minorities, official documents state that minority
402 students should master their ethnic minority language first before developing com-
403 petence in Putonghua. With Putonghua being promoted as a common language for
404 the nation, these programs contribute to a linguistic hierarchy, in which Putonghua
405 enjoys a higher status than ethnic languages. In contrast, Putonghua is the legitimate
406 language for instruction in Chinese-English bilingual education as protected by the
407 relevant law. In practice, Chinese-English bilingual education has resulted in another
408 linguistic hierarchy in which English has a much higher status than Putonghua. The
409 contradictory appropriations of Putonghua in the two types of bilingual education
10 X.A. Gao and W. Wang
410 reveal tensions between “globalization and the political agendas of the nation state,
411 and between various ideological and cultural forces”in China (Feng 2007, p. 8). It
412 seems that the future of bilingual education in China depends on how the interactions
413 of various social, cultural, and political forces will affect the dynamic relationship of
414 the languages –the national standard Chinese, the many languages of ethnic
415 minorities, and English. Its ultimate development may hang critically on how
416 China will define itself along the linguistic line, as it might be a rather challenging
417 project for the Chinese government to “foster cultural pluralism and national stability
418 through a shared sense of national belonging”(Leibold and Chen 2014, p.16).
419 It is noteworthy that the Chinese government has always regarded linguistic
420 diversity as a threat to political unity, and for this reason Emperor Qin Shi Huang
421 (the first emperor, BC 221) standardized the written language to create a linguistic
422 basis for a unified Chinese empire (Chen 1999). Successive Chinese dynasties and
423 governments have attempted to maintain a shared linguistic medium for communi-
424 cation (Li and Zhu 2010). Therefore, the future of China’s bilingual education
425 programs depends on whether the Chinese government feels confident enough in
426 managing these challenging tasks.
427 Cross-References
428 Angel M. Y. Lin: Code-switching in the Classroom: Research Paradigms and
429 Approaches (Volume 1)
430 Minglang Zhou: Language Policy and Education in Greater China (Volume 5)
431 Ofelia Garcia and Angel M. Y. Lin: Translanguaging and Bilingual Education
432 (Volume 10)
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Bilingual Education in the People’s Republic of China 13
Index Terms:
Chinese-English bilingual education 2
CCUEI 6
economic growth 8
Fuhexing Rencai 10
in schools and universities 6
lack of empirical research 9
lack of legal protection 8
Shanghai Education Commission 7
social consequences 9
Ethnic minority students 2–6
Min-Han Jiantong 4
People’s Republic of China 2
Zou chu qu 8
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