Bilingual Education, Attitude And National Cultural Identity

Ethnic language is one of the essential characteristics of a nation, the chief factor ofthe nation's coming into being and the dominating ground for the nation's culturalidentification. As a multination country, the ethnic language is a valuable recourse,but some of the ethnic language are being place by Standard Chinese gradually,therefore facing the danger of extinction. Bilingual Education is an important way toreserve and transfer the ethnic language and culture, however, in the course of thepractice of Bilingual Education in Chinese ethnic region, some of the ethnic peopleprefer Chinese than their own language. The purpose of this study is to explore anddiscuss the cause of the ethnic people's attitude toward Bilingual Education anddisclose how the attitude affects the ethnic people's cultural identification.The current Bilingual Education research focuses on such problems as TeachingMethod, Li~struction Models and Effect Evaluation. Although there are someresearchers who involved in this field, this article connects Bilingual Educationattitudes to the cultural identification of the ethnic people for the first time. We makea case study combining with questionnaire survey, interviewing survey anddocumentary survey in the Ethnic Normal School in ZhenNing, Guizhou province.We research the case in the Hmong's cultural change and their particular livingcircumstances.It is found that most of the Hmong students are opposed to learning Hmonglanguage in schools, while they think it is necessary to reserve their language becauseit is the symbol of Hmong. We consider that the attitude of the Hmong student towardBilingual Education has its historical and cultural reason. It is a result of thecontinually ecological change of the cultural surroundings for Hmong language inZhenning which is caused by conflict and interaction between the Hmong culture andother cultures, and there is even less space for Hmong language today. The BilingualEducation in Zhenning teaches students Hmong language separately, neglecting thechange in cultural surroundings, so it's hard to motivate the students to learn.~lthough the Hmong students are unwilling to learn their own language, they still4gard themselves as part of Hmong, because they can find identification through theirmutual origins or other cultural characteristics. So the Hmong students BilingualEducation should be recognized as a shifi of the foundations for their cultureidentification other than their negation to their culture. To change this "deadlanguage" model in Bilingual Education, our suggestion is to place the Hmonglanguage education into the Hmong family and community , and supply culturalknowledge for the students ,thus a studying background of Hmong culture is created,...