Research On The Economic Perspective Of Bilingual Teaching In Chinese Institutions Of Higher Education

The 21st century is age of knowledge, information and economic integration; foreign language (especially English) education with its important status in the education has drawn the governments and the public's attention in the world. This is the reason that the level of foreign language directly has great impact on the speed and quality of absorbing and exchanging information. Not only does it reflects a country's level of education, but also relates to national economic development.With China's successful accession to the WTO, acceleration of the process of globalization and the increasingly frequent international exchanges, the society is in great demand for the talents who not only master professional knowledge but also understand the foreign language, and even have increased as a country's needs. How to improve the quality of foreign language teaching becomes the focus of university reform in China. Bilingual teaching is a teaching model in which a foreign language as the medium of instruction for learning the non-language subjects; therefore, it is paid much attention for many countries.In the modern world, with the increasing of communication and cooperation between foreign countries, China's higher education is facing a more intense international competition environment, it pushes China in such conditions which greatly need the talented people who not only possess professional knowledge but also master the foreign language. Therefore, many of China's colleges and universities try to implement the bilingual teaching. For various historical, social, economic and other purposes, many countries and regions (such as the United States, Canada, Singapore, etc.) have successfully implemented the bilingual education.In the 1990s, bilingual education started in China. Due to a late start, at present, there are still some problems to be resolved for Chinese bilingual education. For example, lack of relevant language policies, shortage of bilingual teachers, does bilingual education in colleges and universities damage the quality of education for other subjects except language subjects? Moreover, what courses are suitable for bilingual education? How to use Chinese-English two languages respectively in the process of implementing bilingual teaching?Throughout the course of development of modern linguistics, the research on linguistics has purely transformed from linguistic research into the study of cross-disciplinary subject, especially in today's era of economic globalization, with the deepening of language study and the profound application of language use, the interdisciplinary research about language attracts more and more experts and scholars'attention. Thus, some disciplines associate with the linguistics, such as sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics. These disciplines aim to improve the linguistic study of the practical value and inspiration. In this thesis, I venture to use both economic and linguistic theories to explain this new phenomenon- bilingual teaching in Chinese universities. Economy and language, these two seemingly unrelated, in fact, have very close ties. Language, as the most important communicative tool, it cannot be divorced from the reality of social and exists in isolation. The language will be affected by many factors, such as political, economic, military force. This thesis will study bilingual teaching only from the economic point of view. However, it will never deny the importance of other factors.This paper aims to explore how to solve the deep-seated problems about Chinese current bilingual teaching from the perspective of the economics of language. It is a new cross-disciplinary subject, which is mainly used to apply the economic theories and methods to analyzing the language-related issues.This study has the characteristics of the broader perspective, new topics. The author tried to explore bilingual education in terms of the method'cost-benefit'analysis in the economics of language, and further increases the understanding of the international spread of English. This thesis expounds on the problems Chinese current bilingual education faces in colleges and universities, and on how to resolve the problems about the degree of using Chinese-English in bilingual teaching. In view of the successful English international promotion, the author summarizes the reasons of its diffusion and puts forward some useful suggestions for the implementation of Chinese-English bilingual teaching in Chinese higher education, which has great significance and practical value both for the individuals and society.