An Empirical Study Of Bilingual Teaching At Tertiary Institutions Of Guangxi

Bilingual education has a long history. In Western countries, it began from the second half of the last century. It started in America, Canada and some other countries and had a great success. Bilingual education in those countries has formed a mature system of basic theories. It is regarded by the worldwide foreign language teaching society as a successful foreign language teaching model. However, in our country, bilingual teaching has come into practice only in recent years. With China's reform, its opening policy and its access to WTO, bilingual comprehensive talents proficient in specialty and English are increasingly favored by the market. Bilingual teaching, that is, using both English and Chinese as mediums of instruction of content subjects, can improve students' English competence. It is now developing rapidly in some universities, middle schools and even primary schools. It is of great significance to search for and construct the rules, models of bilingual teaching with China's characteristics. In order to accelerate the development of bilingual teaching at tertiary institutions in China, researchers have begun to pay attention to this subject and have conducted some studies. However, few empirical studies have been conducted on the general implementation of bilingual teaching in Guangxi.This empirical study attempts to answer the following questions: What is bilingual teaching? How is bilingual teaching perceived and practiced at tertiary institutions of Guangxi? What problems exist in the implementation of bilingual teaching? The subjects for this study are students of different majors, and some bilingual teachers from universities of Guangxi where bilingual teaching experiments have been conducted or are being conducted. Evidence from the data analysis of questionnaires, interviews and classroom observations with SPSS 10.0 shows that the current bilingual teaching practiced at tertiary institutions of Guangxi is just at the preliminary stage, and the shortage of teachers is the key factor influencing the development of the current college bilingual teaching. Other factors that are important for the development of bilingual teaching include teaching approaches, teaching materials, and bilingual environment. Results from the study show that in the phase of experiment, bilingual teaching is confronted with many problems, such as the lack of the bilingual atmosphere and teachers, the less suitability of the teaching materials, the inappropriateness of teaching methods and effectiveness evaluation. Recommendations to improve college bilingual teaching are proposed, including training more bilingual teachers, improving students' language competence, choosing suitable teaching materials, creating favorable bilingual learning environment, etc. The author hopes that some research results of this study can be of great help to college bilingual teaching in Guangxi and offer some implications for decision-making of educators, researchers and police-makers.