An Investigation On The Present Situation Of Bilingual Teaching In N Universities

Bilingual education in universities is one part of teaching reform of higher education in our country. It has been developing for more than ten years with a lot of attention and quite rich theoretical research results. However, if analyze from time dimension, we can see that, the related research on bilingual education in universities keeps on decreasing after the transitory peak in recent years. What cause this phenomenon? What is the actual development situation of bilingual education in universities today? What is the feeling and expectation of the related teachers and students? If we want to make bilingual education exist continually and valuably, what difficulties should we overcome? These problems are all worth deep thinking currently.Arming with these questions, this thesis takes University N as a case to study. After knowing the basic information of bilingual education in University N, I have done a questionnaire survey on 176 students and a qualitative interview on 10 students and 9 teachers, in order to explore the present situation of bilingual education in this university. The result shows:bilingual education in University N is spontaneous and scattered; its bilingual courses focus on international and pioneering disciplines; the overall level of its bilingual education is not high; and the specific process of its bilingual education has a lot of defects.Basing on the survey data and combining the interviewees’views, I find that the reasons of the development situation of bilingual education in University N today are as follows. The first is promotive factors, including students’demand of improving themselves, teachers’require of teaching international courses or imparting frontier disciplinary knowledge, and the promotion of Chinese-foreign cooperation in education. The second is retaining factors, including the influence of teachers’source and the course pay incentive from some schools. The last is constraining factors, including the society’s restrict to students(the disadvantages of traditional education make students fall into lazy habits of thinking; temptation from the complex society makes students be no longer restless), the research’s restrict to teachers(teachers’ time and energy in teaching is divided by scientific research; the utilitarian scientific research becomes teachers’ general choice), the quantity’s restrict to quality(increasing university enrollments make students’ whole quality not high; no screening make bilingual education more difficult), and the target’s restrict to process(the differences of teachers’ targets make the teaching content contradictory; the specification of students’target make the teaching method outmoded; the "linguistic nature" of teaching target make the examination "heavy form of light elements).In order to make bilingual education in universities develop continually and effectively, we need to make efforts from multiple perspectives. The first is to assure students’being excellent and well-adapted, which need us to set prerequisites of courses to prioritize teaching object, and open a guiding desk to help students accommodate it. The second is to enhance teachers’being professional and stabilized, which need us to strengthen teachers’ training and education to promote their professional development, and perfect incentive mechanism to stabilize the teaching staff structure. The third is to improve the plan of teaching process, which need us to lay emphasis on discipline characteristics to design curriculum rationally, reform teaching contents to improve the teaching effect, renew teaching methods to highlight the bilingual nature, and implement corresponding reforms to excavate external forces. The last is to implement the establishment and perfection of the teaching management systems.