The Comparison And Enlightenment On Primary Bilingual Education Between The United States And China

With the worldwide globalization, bilingual education is becoming the developmental trend in elementary education. From 1990s on, bilingual researches and experiments have been carrying on by some schools in China's coastal areas. Although these researches are still in their infancy, as an important part of the curriculum reform in basic education, bilingual education is emerging as one of the focuses of China's education reform. However, bilingual education in many other countries has a long history, especially in the U.S.A where bilingual education started about 500 years ago, and who has already a set of theoretical systems of curriculum, teaching model, faculty-building and evaluation in bilingual education, which is worth our learning, researching and comparing. It can help our bilingual education reformation, which is aimed to improve English level and cultivate international bilingual talent, to study the development of bilingual education and to compare the implementation of bilingual education between the U.S.A. and ChinaTaking the Cushman School in Miami U. S. A. and the Primary School of Hunan University in China as the study objects, through case analysis, based on the objective practice, with detailed data, this thesis diagnosed and analyzed the bilingual education in the two schools which have long-term friendly cooperation relations and are famous for their bilingual education. In this thesis comparative analysis is also used, from the purpose, curriculum, teaching model, qualified teachers and evaluation, to explore the pros and cons and enlightenment of Sino-US bilingual education implementation strategies.This thesis includes 4 chapters. Chapter 1 is an introduction. In the first part of the introduction, the backgrounds of the issue are explained from a micro view to a macro view. The backgrounds are as below:the differences appeared in the exchange program between Sino-US two bilingual schools; there exists utilitarian in the practice value of some schools that carry on bilingual teaching; the necessity of the implementation of bilingual education under the background of globalization; the significance of our study to the development of bilingual education, and to the development of the two schools. The second part of the introduction is a literature review. We made a statistical analysis of the literature to prove that bilingual has increasingly becoming a hot topic. The third part is the research methods.Chapterâ…¡is a general overview of bilingual education in both Chinese school and American school. The first section of the chapter is an introduction of the Primary School of Hunan University's bilingual education. It analyzed the implementation of bilingual education background, i.e. on one side it is positive impact from the vigorous development of bilingual education in China, on the other side it is one of the characteristics of the primary school. It also explored the three stages of the development:the initial stage of leading ideas, the developing stage of researching and improving the bilingual school-based curriculum and teaching evaluation system, and the deepening stage of immersion international exchanges. Section 2 outlines the bilingual education in the Cushman school, U. S. which includes the development background of the U.S.A bilingual education and their basic situation of bilingual education. The third chapter is the most important part of this thesis which studies the similarities and differences of the purpose of bilingual education, the curriculum, teacher training and teaching model between China and America. We believe that bilingual education can promote social development and human being development. We also emphases that bilingual education can promote school development which was neglected by the original bilingual education researchers. In addition, this chapter showed the bilingual curriculum of the two schools and found the wide gap of teachers' training between two countries. Chapterâ…£is the revelation chapter. We think that the development of bilingual education in China will follow the trajectory of the United States; bilingual education should be returned to the essential function of education; three-dimensional system of bilingual programs should be built, the curriculum structure should be optimized; the bilingual teacher professional development should speed up; bilingual teaching model should be localized based on the local conditions and national conditions.The contributions of this thesis are listed below:(1) It tries to compare bilingual education based on two schools in China and the U.S.A respectively; (2) It considers the new phenomena emerged in American bilingual education under the action of English superior assimilation;(3) More concern on the function of social and human being development; (4) It emphasizes the significance of activity curriculum and recessive curriculum. The curriculum system in the cases has universal meaning and practicability.