An Empirical Study On The Effect Of Bilingual Education In Chinese-Foreign Cooperatively-Run Programs

Against the background of increasing academic exchange between Chinese and overseas educational organizations, especially after China entered WTO, a new phenomenon which is hard to escape comment is that there appear more and more Chinese-foreign cooperatively-run programs on advanced education level. Compared with bilingual education in non-cooperatively-run programs, bilingual education in these programs is more likely to succeed with its unique resources and environment. Hence, the writer believes that research priority should be given to the bilingual education in cooperatively-run programs. By investigating and evaluating the results of bilingual education in cooperatively-run programs, we may draw some lessons and borrow some ideas from it and promote this kind of educational form in universities and colleges where suitable settings are set and adjusted, thus enhancing the English proficiency of Chinese students in both cooperatively-run programs and non-cooperatively-run programs.This study has two main purposes. The first is to examine whether bilingual education is more effective than regular education in improving students'language proficiency, the second aim is to identify whether all students are able to benefit from bilingual education, regardless of different English proficiency level. Thus the Tourism Management students from Finance College and the Hotel Management students from Tourism College in Shanghai Normal University were selected as the experimental group and the parallel group, and CET4 and CET6 scores of both groups were analyzed by Independent-Samples T-test. Besides, students from Finance College were selected to fill in a questionnaire, which was designed to investigate the effects and implementation of bilingual education of Finance College.In light of the findings, the pre-study analysis shows that the two groups of students has no significant difference in their English proficiency but the post-study analysis reveals that there is a significant difference in the English proficiency level of the two groups. In other words, compared with students who receive regular education, students in bilingual education have a faster rate of acquisition. Also, according to the results of the questionnaire, bilingual education is necessary but not suitable to all of students. Most of the surveyed subjects agree that there should be a threshold English proficiency level which students must attain before receiving bilingual education. Given the small size of the sample data, the findings presented here are not meant to be generalized to larger samples, but rather are used to reveal possible trends worth examining in further research.