Bilingual Education Research

With the coining and development of the society of knowledge economy, informationalization and globalization, English is gradually established as a common language in the world. Besides, China's access to WTO makes it likely that modern education is confronted with many challenges ever since. The challenges are mainly involved in the change of talents' training criteria, the change of learning means and techniques, and the change of learning contents. On the surface level, it can be found that these "Three Changes" have little co-ordination among them; On the nature's level, however, a common point can be analyzed out that modern education must strengthen the teaching of English while enhancing students' English theoretical competence and comprehensive practical ability in an all-round way. In order to meet with the new challenges ,some schools in China have started to try a completely new experiment---bilingual education experiment-- one that uses Chinese and English to teach such non-language subjects as mathematics, physics, chemistry , natural science, computer and so on. Attempts are made so to accommodate students with more opportunities of information input,to build a better language learning environment ,and to bridge the gap of failure and loss of English teaching and learning in China; hence changing the situation of "Deaf and Dumb English".Even though China has implemented the Chinese-Foreign(mainly English) bilingual education for a long time, for some reason or that, the experiences have not been remained till now. Therefore, bilingual education, in modern sense, is still in the process of trial and error, during which there exists many bottle-neck problems like the nature and the definition of bilingual education,the building of its teaching staff ,the developing of its teaching materials,the constructing of its education models ,the establishing of its appraisal system and the making of its laws and regulations. Strategies need to be probed into the solving of the above-mentioned problems and into the sound development of China's bilingual education experiments. In abroad, many countries have been implementing bilingual education .Their rich accumulated experiences are undoubtedly beneficial to China's bilingual education.Fortunately, it is pleased to notice that the more bilingual education experiments are done, the more scholars are interested in them . However, to be frankly speaking, the made achievements are more of China's practical research. Even if there are achievements on the foreign countries' research, they are just about the models and the brief introductions, lacking deep investigation into them.. Based on these, this dissertation bridges this gap and contribute to the of solving the bottle-neck problems in China's context. By consulting profound foreign first-handed original materials and doing a lot of classroom observation / interviews in the schools of Shanghai and Guangdong province, thisdissertation makes a deep analysis and comparison between China and some foreign countries in the fields of the nature and the definition of bilingual education, the building of its teaching staff ,the developing of its teaching materials, the constructing of its education models, the establishing of its appraisal system and the making of its laws and regulations. The dissertation consists of six chapters, counting to 260 thousand words.Chapter One deals with the nature and the definition of bilingual education. At the start, it discusses the differences of the between home and abroad. Then, it analyzes bilingual education's complexity and its functions,bilingual learners' types and their advantages,bilingual education's theoretical foundation (i.e. second language acquisition, bilingual education theories, constructivist theory).Thirdly, some cases in America, Singapore and Australia are cited in this chapter. Finally, the author of the dissertation suggests a tentative framework of bilingual education's definition.Chapter Two is concerned with the building of the teachi...