Problems And Suggested Solutions To Bilingual Education In Southwestern Tertiary Institutions

Nowadays, bilingual education, which refers to the use of a second or foreign language in school for the teaching of content subject, is attracting more and more people's attention. As a revolutionary teaching method, it firstly emerged in North America in the 1960s. Some developed countries, such as America, Canada, and Singapore, have conducted bilingual education for several decades.While some important achievements have been made in bilingual education, it also poses some problems, such as the teacher resources, curriculum design and the students' proficiency which are often encountered in the implementation of bilingual education. So the dispute about bilingual education is still going on.Ever since the issuing of [2001(4)] document from the Ministry of Education of China, many bilingual education programs have been developed for the non-English majors in universities and colleges, especially the ones located in the coastal and eastern developed areas, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Shandong and so on, although they still also have some problems. While for the universities and colleges in the western areas, they are left behind because of many factors. Southwest University is chosen as a case in the present thesis for the reason that Southwest University, which is located in the southwestern areas of China, is a key comprehensive university directly under the Ministry of Education. Its development in the bilingual education will set a good example to other universities and colleges in southwestern areas. Southwest University began to implement bilingual education from 2003, and it has accumulated some valuable teaching experience. However, compared with some key universities and colleges in the coastal and developed areas, it still has many shortcomings and problems in many aspects.The present thesis attempts to conduct an investigation among 160 students and three teachers of different non-English majors in the Southwest University under the guide of the related theories of Second Language Acquisition and Constructivist view of learning using the methods of questionnaire, classroom observation and interview, and it aims to answer the following questions: (1) What are the main problems in the bilingual education programs in Southwest University? (2) What is the most suitable bilingual education model recently for Southwest University? (3)What are the students' attitudes towards bilingual education? (4) How to solve the problems and improve bilingual education?Through investigation, some problems in the implementation of bilingual education in Southwest University are found out in the aspects of bilingual teacher resources, teaching materials, curriculum design, evaluation methods and the quality of bilingual class, and then the reasons of the problems are analyzed. Based on the findings, the author thinks that recently, the content-based modified transitional model should be the proper choice. And some suggested solutions are proposed, such as strengthening the construction of bilingual teachers' team, reasonable selection and compiling of bilingual textbooks, optimizing the curriculum design and so on. Besides, the author finds that half of the students hold positive attitude towards bilingual education and their attitudes are strongly correlated with their English interest. Therefore, measures should be taken to intrigue students in English learning, which will be greatly beneficial to the development of bilingual education.At present, the problems on bilingual education in Southwest University may also exist in other universities in southwestern areas. Therefore, to some extent, the results of the present thesis will be beneficial to the bilingual education in some other universities and colleges in the southwestern areas.