Bilingual Education in China

In comparison with the status of bilingual education (BE) in the People’s Republic of China, a great deal more is known about its development in the countries of Europe and North America (Feng 2007, vii). Traditional form of BE in this country has a lot of varieties determined by the educational context of students and the diversity of languages spoken in the regions. At the same time, Chinese-English bilingual education becomes increasingly popular in China due to the important global challenges the country faces. In order to evaluate the extent to which this form of BE is beneficial it is necessary to consider individual and social opportunities and costs of bilingual education, particularly connected with English language proficiency. This essay will examine social, economic and cultural benefits of Chinese-Engish bilingual education and attempt to analyze their importance for China.

The established model of BE in China, called “language maintenance” or “heritage language” bilingual education, represents the using of the mother tongue by language minority students as a main language of instruction, generally, in schools, sometimes in other educational institutions (Baker and Prys 1998, 508). This form of bilingual education pursues two main objectives: to sustain the mother tongue of students from different ethnic minorities (e.g., Korean, Mongolian, Zhuang, Tibetian, Miao, Sala) through “the use of a native minority language and standard Chinese [i.e., Putonghua or Mandarin Chinese]” and facilitate their integration process into mainstream culture (Feng 2005, 529, quoted in He 2011, 92).

However, during the last 20 years language learning trends have noticeably changed in favour of the study of English as a foreign language, ...

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...classroom and apply it in further educational process (Tong and Shi, 2012, 169-170).

In conclusion, it was stated that due to the vital global challenges the country encounters, Chinese-English bilingual education represents a significant issue in Chinese education. Assuming all the arguments discussed in this essay it might be suggested that this form of BE appears to provide economic, occupational and cultural benefits for the Chinese society due to the increase of English language proficiency among the population. However, it was also noted that today Chinese-English BE faces three main challenges in its promotion, but all of them already have available solutions. Therefore, the broad implementation of bilingual education in China might cost time for the government but appears to have considerable advantages which could benefit the country in the foreseen future.