Comparative Study Of Bilingual Education Models

Globalization intensifies the international competition and also enhances the cross-national social, cultural, economic, technical, and personnel exchanges, which sets higher standards and requirements for the cultivation of talents in the 21st century. Bilingual and multilingual talents that are in good command of both professional knowledge and one or several foreign languages are earnestly expected throughout the world. Both developed and developing countries pay much attention to bilingual education and bilingual teaching.1 Some countries have conducted a lot of pioneering work and achieved great success in implementing bilingual education. In China, especially after its entry to the WTO, bilingual teaching grows more and more popular with the further implementation of its reform and open-up policy. Many scholars and educators have introduced foreign works on bilingual education to guide the practice of bilingual teaching in China. However, some of the arguments concerning bilingual teaching and bilingual education remain to be unclear and inconsistent. Misconceptions about bilingual teaching and bilingual education are still there. Some basic questions such as"What is bilingual education/teaching?","Why bilingual education/teaching?","Are there any differences between bilingual education and bilingual teaching?","How to conduct bilingual education/teaching?"have not been properly answered. Moreover, the issue of"Whether bilingual teaching can be implemented successfully in China?"still arouses controversy in the concerned circle of study. The paper attempts to propose tentative answers to these questions.In practice, the implementation of bilingual education varies from country to country as a result of its own complexity. Some countries have established their own bilingual teachers'training system, teaching methodology, classroom management and evaluation system. The author has collected a great deal of information relating to bilingual education and bilingual teaching from various domestic and overseas sources. The author studies definitions and practices of bilingual teaching and bilingual education in different countries, trying to present in great detail four basic bilingual education models: immersion bilingual education model in Canada, two-way bilingual education model in the United States, two-teacher bilingual education model in Japan and three-stream bilingual education model in Singapore. Through a comparative...