The Effect Of Immersion Education Program On Participants’ English Learning In A Chinese High School:A Case Study

In2009, the latest Curriculum Reform of Basic Education started in China. Before long, the new version of the Guide for Basic Foreign Language Education Reform was issued. However, the reform on English curriculum and teaching still has a long way to go because of the existing problems concerning English education in high schools. In this context, Immersion Education (IE) has been pushed to the frontier of the reform. There have been a lot of studies carried out on the implementation of IE in primary schools and colleges while much fewer studies on IE have been conducted in high schools.It is against this backdrop that I carried out this case study in order to figure out whether immersion education could be applied on a large scale in high schools and to get an in-depth understanding of the effect of immersion programs in China. Specifically, three sample learners in a high school immersion program were selected as my research subjects. During the10-week field work, I collected data by interviews, observations and examinations of the educational documents. The results of the data analysis revealed that the three learners have made substantial improvement in their English competence after a period of learning in the IE program.This paper is comprised of five parts. The first chapter deals with how immersion education has been introduced into Chinese high schools. Chapter two introduces relevant theories and research on immersion program as well as the theoretical framework for the current study. Chapter three describes the research design including the data collection and data analysis procedures of the study. Chapter four describes the research findings and makes further discussions. The last chapter presents the conclusions of this research and makes suggestions for further research.