Discussing Bilingual Teaching In Universities From The Perspective Of Language Competence Of Both Teachers And Students

Ever since the issuing of the Fourth Document in 2001 from the Ministry of Education of China, many bilingual teaching courses have been opened to non-English majors. Unfortunately, the bilingual teaching conducted in China does not have fertile bilingual language environment in the Chinese- dominated society, which results in a serious worry about the English language competence of both teachers and students, and particularly, the focus on the language competence of bilingual teachers has already become a deep concern of the public. People even believe that it is the teachers that should be responsible for most of the unsuccessful cases in bilingual teaching, but it is not necessary the case.This thesis examines the academic and English proficiency of the bilingual students after a period of bilingual teaching, as well as the language competence of teachers and students required by bilingual teaching through score comparison, questionnaire, interview and class observation. In light of the findings, although bilingual students are better than non-bilingual students in English, their academic performance is lower. One possible reason is that their low English competence influences the attaining of subject knowledge, which is proved afterwards that compared with the teachers, the English competence of students in bilingual programs calls for more concern. Therefore, it is not suitable to conduct bilingual teaching in large scales in China. As for the bilingual teaching experiment, the author suggests on strengthening the system of student selecting and teacher training.