A Case Study Of Chinese-English Bilingual Education Programs In China's Tertiary Institution

Globalization intensifies the international competition and also enhances the cross-national social, cultural, economic, technical, and personnel exchanges, which sets higher standards and requirements for the cultivation of talents in the 21st century. Bilingual and multilingual talents that are in good command of both professional knowledge and one or several foreign languages are earnestly expected throughout the world. In order to gear to the need of the cultivation of talents of 21st century, bilingual education has become one of the most important problems in university's education reform.Canada, Singapore and U.S.A. are countries with distinct characteristics of multiethnic and multi-culture. They have accumulated a lot of valuable and successful experience and found out a number of effective methods in the practice of bilingual education. But because China and those foreign countries have remarkable differences in national conditions and histories, it is impossible to imitate the ready-made bilingual education model of other countries. We should see that bilingual education is still in an experimental stage. With expansion and promotion of bilingual education in our country, there are many bottleneck problems influencing its practice smoothly. There are much blindness and random in varying degrees in Chinese university's bilingual education. Misconceptions about bilingual education exist. Some people misinterpreted the concept of bilingual education, simply regarding it as the intensive teaching of English. This thesis, which is just a theoretical research of the subject, gave a detailed analysis of the problems facing the bilingual education in China. In the light of the current practices and reforms, some reflections and suggestions are given to these problems. First, we should improve the quality of bilingual class. The inadequate bilingual class efficiency existed as a great hindrance, due to the comparatively low speaking and listening capability of some students. Second, qualified bilingual teachers are in urgent need. The shortage of qualified bilingual teaching faculty has already become a serious barrier to China's bilingual education practice. Some teachers with perfect English skill know little specialty knowledge, while others specializing in a field can not express ideas in English adequately. Third, bilingual teaching materials need to be rich. The current English teaching materials are compiled with improving English proficiency as its main goal. However, bilingual education needs English books on various subject matters, for example, biology, math, chemistry, etc. Fourth, we lack a suitable bilingual learning environment for students. Bilingual learning environment enables learners to have easy access to sufficient input and to output of language. Studying a foreign language is usually disadvantaged due to lack of an appropriate language environment.The writer hopes that certain research results of this case study can be of help to the teaching of English and some other subjects in universities, especially in the aspect of bilingual education. Undoubtedly, this thesis has also strengthened the writer's comprehension of bilingual education.