A Study Of Tibetan Children's Metalanguage Awareness Under The Background Of Bilingual Education

Bilingual education is a system of national characteristics in ethnic education in our country.It is the most important aspect of ethnic education in our country.It is guided by ethnic policy,combined with the political,economic and cultural backgrounds of ethnic regions and the reality of education.Bilingualism is a condition that allows the inter-national language(Chinese)and the national language to be organically combined.The biculturalism tradition and the necessary knowledge,skills,attitudes,and values of modern society are the contents of education,and bilingual teaching is the mainstay of ethnic education form.In the context of bilingual education,ethnic minority students differ from Han students in that they learn Chinese and English at the same time while learning their mother tongue.However,in practical language teaching,minority students still accept and use the same teaching model as Han students,ignoring the special cognitive and language experience they developed in the context of bilingual education.Therefore,it is very necessary to study the meta-language awareness of ethnic minority students in the context of bilingual education in our country and put forward some suggestions suitable for their language study.Meta-language awareness is a special language form based on language itself,which considers language itself as the object of reflection and study,including phonological awareness,lexical awareness,syntactic awareness,and pragmatic awareness.The development of meta-language awareness is conducive to the learners’mastery of language forms,language rules and language logic.The level of meta-language awareness can reflect the language ability of learners to a certain extent.Studying the students’ meta-language awareness in ethnic minority areas will help improve the overall quality of bilingual education in ethnic minority areas and promote the flourishing development of bilingual education in ethnic minority areas.In order to effectively improve the level of language learning ability among ethnic minority students in the context of bilingual education,the present study is based on threshold theory,control analysis theory,and multilingual dynamic model theory.218 students from grade 3 to grade 4 of Y elementary school in Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture were used as research subjects.Students were divided into four groups by using student background questionnaires and classroom observation and interviews.:balanced bilinguals did not learn English,unbalanced bilinguals did not learn English,balanced bilinguals has learned English and unbalanced bilinguals has learned English.On this basis,the Meta-linguistic Consciousness Questionnaire compiled by Pinto et al.was used to measure the meta-language awareness of the four groups of students and the measurement results were analyzed.The results showed that:(1)the performance of "balanced bilinguals did not learn English" is better than "unbalanced bilinguals did not learn English" in phonological awareness,vocabulary awareness and syntactic awareness;(2)the performance of "balanced bilinguals has learned English" is better than "unbalanced bilinguals has learned English" in phonological awareness and syntactic awareness;but not significantly different from "unbalanced bilinguals has learned English" in terms of vocabulary awareness;(3)English learning experience contributes to phonological awareness and vocabulary awareness not only balanced bilinguals but also unbalanced bilinguals,but have no significant influence on bilinguals in syntactic awareness.The research results have important reference and significance for the bilingual education of ethnic minorities:The bilingual education policy should be formulated according to the minority language students’ meta-language awareness developing in the context of bilingual education and the factors that influence the development of the meta-language awareness;the teaching materials of the minorities’ should be revised according to the feature of their meta-language awareness;at the same time,we should pay attention to the construction of the bilingual teacher faculty,and train the students’ meta-language awareness in the classroom teaching specially.