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Bilingual education importance
Bilingual education importance
Bilingual education importance
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Yanyin Yu, or more commonly known by her American name, Nicole Yu, is an international fourth-year transfer student at the University of California, Berkeley. She is of Chinese descent; born and raised in the Guangdong province of southeast China, Nicole didn’t move to America until she turned sixteen years old. She spent her entire childhood in China – receiving an education from Chinese educators, socializing in Mandarin and Cantonese with her friends, and immersing herself in her own native culture for most of her life. Prior to immigrating to America, Nicole attended a public school in China where all of her teachers were Chinese natives. At Nicole’s school in China, however, English is a required course of study taught mostly by emphasizing English vocabulary, completing short one-page writing assignments, and practicing spelling. Learning English pronunciations and engaging in realistic English conversation wasn’t the goal for educators in China. The goal in China was to prepare students to pass their post-high school exam, which was their ticket into attending a university. The exam is highly demanding for Chinese students because it requires knowledge of English reading, comprehension, spelling and writing. For Nicole, the most stressful part of this exam was that students taking it …show more content…
She says these courses helped reinforce her writing and public speaking skills, and it was in community college where she gave her first formal presentation entirely in English, which to her felt both nerve-wracking and liberating. After completing two years of community college, Nicole filled out her transfer student application to UCB, UCLA, UCSD, and UCI. Giving credit to her essay about immigration and English-learning, Nicole was admitted to all four universities, but decided to attend Berkeley due to its proximity to her family and
Chua believes that Chinese parents force their children to be academically successful in order to reach “higher” goals in life. She emphasizes this when she states “…Chinese parents have … higher dreams for their children…” (Chua 8). Although Amy set higher s...
One striking similarity in the writings is that all characters lose their heritage over time. In “The Struggle to Be an All-American Girl”, Elizabeth was forced to attend Chinese school by her mother to retain her Chinese heritage and to speak proficient Chinese. However, she hated the Chinese School and strongly preferred speaking English over Chinese. She...
The article “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior” by Amy Chua demonstrates the two different mind sets of parenting: Chinese parenting and Western approach to parenting. In my view, Chinese parenting is very strict about school work and extracurricular activities such as pianos and violins. For example, if we compare the two different sets of parenting; Chua says, for instance that Western parents believe that they are strict by forcing their kids practice their instruments for 30 minutes a day at most to an hour. This is nothing compared to the Chinese parents that would say the first hour of practice is easy it’s the second or third hour that gets tough (Chua 2011). This shows how forcefully strict the Chinese parents are compared to Western parents. The Chinese parents would say anything that really has to be said to their kid’s straight forward, but the Westerns would go about telling their kids, so it won’t hurt their feelings or their self-esteem. A few of these examples come to show that Chinese parents have intelligent kids, but are they intelligent enough for society? In other words are these Chinese children capable to work in group projects compared to an American kid that lives the usually life as a kid; like going to sleepovers and participating in different school activities. This is what David Brooks actually discusses about in his article “Amy Chua Is a Wimp”, says that Amy Chua’s way of parenting which is Chinese parenting isn’t effective enough. Well sure their kids are very intelligent and get high grades, but can they participate in well-functioning groups? One thing that Chinese parenting lacks in is a skill set that is not taught formally, but is imparted through strenuous experiences. This is exactly what Chua...
Amy Chua (2011) names off three reasons that support her argument in why Chinese children are more successful. First, she mentions that Westerners worry too much on how their child will accept failure, whereas Chinese parents assume only strength in their child and nothing less. For example, if a Western child comes home with a B on a test, some parents will praise the child on their success and some may be upset, while a Chinese parent would convince their child they are “worthless” and “a disgrace.” The Western parents hope to spare their children’s feelings and to be careful not to make their child feel insecure or inadequate, while Chinese parents demand perfect grades because they believe their children can get them (Chua, 2011). Secondly, Chinese parents believe their chil...
The scene is always the same: the three of us sitting in a room together, talking. I see her from the corner of my eye, glancing for only a second or two, but always long enough to notice the look on her face, the expression I’ve become so painfully familiar with over the years. I am forced to turn away; the conversation resumes. She is a few feet from us. She hears everything, and understands nothing except what she can gather from the expressions on our faces, the tone of our voices. She pretends not to be bothered, smiling at us and interjecting random questions or comments in Chinese—a language I was raised to speak, a language I’ve slowly forgotten over the years, a language that is now mine only by blood. It is an earnest but usually futile attempt to break through the invisible barrier that separates her from us, and in spite of all her efforts to hide it, that sad, contem...
In a word, both family and school play a crucial role in American born Chinese’s socialization process. Both of them influence ABC’s behaviors, norms and personalities.
My parents come from China, my mom grew up in Taisan and my dad grew up in Guangdong. Around age twenty, they migrated to San Francisco, California where they met and later got married. A few years later they had my older brother and then me with a seven year age gap. I lived there for about 9 years, then we had moved to Bottineau, North Dakota for a year and after that we moved and have been living in Ohio since then. We’ve prevailed a huge transition from moving to the suburbs from a big city. With my first language being Chinese, because my parents only spoke Chinese, I had to learn English through school. Also the large population of Asians in the area of San Francisco that we lived in spoke little to no English,
Generally, Chinese education is focused on repetition and memorization. Chinese students spend more time on study to improve their memory. We frequently hear that how Chinese parents treat their children like a slave, which is not true. A slave is someone who is the property of another person and has to work for that person, but Chinese parents didn’t want any return from their children. According to the article “Two Kinds”, Tan’s mother claims that “trade housecleaning services for weekly lessons and a piano for Tan”(Tan 3). Tan’s mother proved all her effort to provide Tan a better life. When Tan failed, her mother would silence for disappointment so that Tan would discover her mistake for improvement. Her mother was upset than anyone else. Besides, Chua has the similar feeling when her daughter fails. They know t...
In Maxine Hong Kingston’s autobiographical piece “Silence”, she describes her inability to speak English when she was in grade school. Kindergarten was the birthplace of her silence because she was a Chinese girl attending an American school. She was very embarrassed of her inability, and when moments came up where she had to speak, “self-disgust” filled her day because of that squeaky voice she possessed (422). Kingston notes that she never talked to anyone at school for her first year of silence, except for one or two other Chinese kids in her class. Maxine’s sister, who was even worse than she was, stayed almost completely silent for three years. Both went to the same school and were in the same second grade class because Maxine had flunked kindergarten.
Stories like Li’s are becoming increasingly. “Most of my Chinese students have troubles during their study in the U.S. due to tones of unaware vocabulary, including everyday vocabulary,” Jin Jin, a Chemistry professor currently works in WIU says, “It confuses me how they could get accepted by WIU in the first place.”
Yang, Gene Luen, and Lark Pien. American Born Chinese. New York: First Second, 2006. Print.
Each of the Chinese mothers attempted to guide her daughters, yet they were ill equipped to translate their life experiences in China to the alien environment they found in America. It was their lives, not their language, that they were unable to translate. Like her friend Lindo, An Mei Hsu was raised the Chinese way, as she describes:
The very first important development for a successful country is to have a respectable education system for those who need it from the first day they are born into the world. We have to instill what we want in our people to reflect how we want our to development to appear. In china their school system has more of a strict structure for example, at Harbin Number One High School; students begin school at 7:00 a.m., and remain until 8:20 p.m. The seniors, preparing for their final examinations, stay later, even until 10:00 at night.(Rybak) In a Chinese school the day are much longer than an American school day. This means that Chinese student spend a lot more time in school which bring us to conclusion that Chinese are more advantaged then the American student in long run. This prepares them for college or even the young adult can be bio-lingual. Most American student usually attends school for seven hours each weekday and may forget what they have learned because it in instilled into the young adults’ heads like the Chinese do with their students.
The majority of these students maintain passive attitudes towards language education, reflecting an unwillingness of acquiring English knowledge. The reason why they study like 'puppets ' throughout the learning process is mainly the pressure from the Chinese society. In general, english is often assessed via a set of tests, particularly in middle schools (Li Xiaoju, 1984). In Chinese college entrance examination, English occupies a high proportion of overall scores which could determine whether you have the permission to entering premium high institutes (Anderson, 1993). Phillipson and Lam (2011) argue that due to Chinese culture which focuses on the social relations, Chinese students normally tend to produce high grades to satisfy parents ' expectation. Therefore, the motivation for learning English of these students mostly lies in the
The Chinese medium schools officially became history in 1987 (Ho, 2016) so it affects the 41 years old and beyond age group. This is shown by the drastic drop in grading themselves above average from the 26-40 age group, and the 41-55 age group. Since, they began their formal education in Mandarin, they might feel relatively insecure in their proficiency in English. Yet, we do see that they do not rank their proficiency in Mandarin high either for the 41 and above age group. This is because of the widespread use of dialects before the Speak Mandarin Campaign in 1979 (Lim & Yak, 2013) resulting in older generation being better in speaking dialects