A Study On Curriculum Of Two-way Immersion Education Of Elementary Schools In California, U.S.

Two-way Immersion (TWI) Education is a new branch of Bilingual Educationwhich has distinctive characteristics and unique way of implementation. Throughlearning the curricula which are provided in mother language and target language,students can develop their mother language; meanwhile, they can naturally acquiretarget language during this process. Also, students can understand different culturescoming from different races through the process of learning. This will lay thefoundation of their cross-cultural communication and living in the multicultural worldeasily in the future.The study first researches the curriculum standards that Californian TWI Educationabides by. Then it analyzes the implementation effects of four schools, which based onfeatures of models of TWI Education. Finally, the study uses Californian River GlenSchool as a case study and analyzes its curriculum provision, implementation and effect.The implementation of TWI Education depends on the school’s curricula.California, one of states which implements TWI Education, makes A Look atKindergarten through Grade Six in California Public Schools and the Common CoreState as standards of its curriculum provision and implementation. And it has been clearabout the curriculum types that public school shall offer. Besides that, it also has beenclear about the breadth and depth of content for different grades. These things makeschools have a operational guidelines. For a common public school, it will use U.S.official language, English, as instructional language and teaching materials language.However, TWI schools are different. They need to abide by the curriculum standardsfirstly, and then they will consider schools features and use double languages to teachdifferent curricula for different grades. During the process of instruction, in order toensure their students can flat or even beyond the average results of unified schooldistrict or state in the California Standards Test (CST), teachers need to use someinstructional strategies which are different with common public schools.TWI has four characteristic experiences such as combination of unified curriculumstandards with special standards, combination of continuity of curriculum provision with hierarchy, the selection and optimization of the teaching mode and teachingstrategies, also including the standardization of curriculum implementation effectevaluation, which has the certain enlightenment significance for our bilingual schools ofHan people mixed areas.