Bilingualism And Global Citizenship Education

Language, culture, identity and citizenship are closely related terms, in which concepts of ’language’ and ’citizenship’ have always been linked to notions of nationality in political thought and consequently, they have been embedded in the national linguistic and educational policies (Chen2013). The term global citizenship is developed with concepts of globalization and cosmopolitanism. As the first global lingua franca, English is chosen not only as the means of commerce, science and technology, but also as an international language of communication among people from different first language backgrounds, across linguacultural boundaries. With China striving to become part of the world economy since the late1970’s open-door policy, there has been a great emphasis placed on the education of young people to become a global citizen with bilingual skills. However, due to political reasons, citizenship education is controversial and should always be highly contextualized. China has used bilingual language policy as one of effective ways of fostering senses of identity at both domestic and international level.My thesis is therefore set with the above understanding, exploring how language and citizenship are interconnected through the national language policy, and what China has done to re-conceptualize citizenship education with an international outlook and educate its population, especially young people to become citizens equipped with communicative competence and an international outlook. The research findings share that Chinese schools and universities are very supportive of bilingual education and think education should prepare young citizens to develop cross cultural perspectives and communicative abilities beyond the national boundary to fit for the world. Bilingual education which enables communication in the world common language is a prerequisite to cultivate citizens’ global awareness and promote the citizenship education in global level. With particular reference to China’s English education over the last three decades, the theses presents a study on China’s changing attitudes towards citizenship education from moral oriented civic education to skill centered global citizen education through bilingualism.