An Investigation Into The Application Of Progressive Bilingual Teaching Model At Bilingual Primary Schools

With the rapid globalization of world economy and the growing need of qualifiedbilinguals, bilingual education has been a hot issue concerned by our whole society andacademic world in recent years. The research on bilingual education abroad has a longhistory of about100years and its practice has been successful in many countries, suchas America, Canada, and Singapore, etc. In China, the exploration and practice ofbilingual teaching started in the1990s in coastal cities and developed regions.Throughout the bilingual education history, many bilingual education modelsaround the world have been formed and become mature in different countries, whilebilingual education started later in China. In2002, the project “bilingual educationresearch and experiment at elementary schools” was ratified by the Chinese Ministryof Education as National Tenth Five-Year Plan of a major project of our whole nation’seducation science. Learning from three most popular bilingual education models in theworld and taking the actual education condition into consideration, scholars in Chinapropose Progressive Bilingual Teaching Model. By the concept of fitting our nationaleducation conditions and abiding the law of students’ cognitive development,Progressive Bilingual Teaching Model divides bilingual teaching process into threephases: infiltration, integration and bilingual thinking and it is considered as one of themain bilingual teaching models by many teaching scholars nowadays.Influenced byCritical Period Hypothesis, scholars in China hold the view that bilingual educationshould begin at students’ elementary school.As a relatively new bilingual teaching model in China, Progressive BilingualTeaching Model still stays at theoretic-oriented state and related applied research is notoften seen. Through the investigation into a bilingual primary school which adoptedProgressive Bilingual Teaching Model several years ago in Zhengzhou, the author did the research on the effects that Progressive Bilingual Teaching Model has exerted onstudents, hoping to provide helpful suggestions for the local bilingual teaching.This research co-uses such instruments as questionnaires, semi-structuredinterviews, tests and classroom observations. The subjects selected in this research arethe Grade Five bilingual class and the normal class students in a bilingual primaryschool in Zhengzhou. Through the combination of both quantitative and qualitativeresearch methodologies, the author made the comparison of the two classes in theaspects of English learning attitude, interest, motivation, habits and the scores of thefinal maths and English exam, and conclusions about the influence that ProgressiveBilingual Teaching Model has exerted on students’ study are drawn accordingly.This investigation mainly concerns the following two questions:1. What is the current situation of bilingual class adopting Progressive BilingualTeaching Model at bilingual primary schools?2. What effects does Progressive Bilingual Teaching Model have on bilingualprimary school students’ English and maths learning?According to the data and results of this research, conclusions are drawn asfollows: the long-term implementation of Progressive Bilingual Teaching Model doesnot have negative effects on students’ maths subject. Students in bilingual class canbenefit from Progressive Bilingual Teaching Model in the aspects of Englishcommunicative competence, the academic achievements in the final English exam,English learning habits and learning motivation, etc.