The Study On The Changes And Inspiration Of Bilingual Education Policies Of The United States

Languages can be defined as one of the most valuable resources to the human society. On the one hand, they are the media that bear the colorful civilizations created by human beings, on the other hand, they also are one of those most important factors which are crucial to social harmony and stability. However, languages are as fragile as many un-renewable natural resources which once perish, they will disappear forever. With the concept of protecting cultural diversity and pluralism being widely accepted, the protection of language resources and the maintenance of cultural pluralism has already become a common concern of all multiethnic countries in the world. Many of the countries have adopted bilingual education as an approach to protect their minority language resources and boost the harmonious development of both mainstream and various minority languages.As one of the countries with abundant language resources, the United States have started the quest for the bilingual education since the very beginning. Having been through many ups and downs, the country decreed its first Bilingual Education Act (BEA)in1968, which recognized and protected the status of bilingual education by law for the first time in its education history.But after only34years, BEA was replaced by English Acquisition Act, which marks the end of BEA. The true reason for this is that for a long time the U.S. mainstream society has always been obsessed with the English language hegemony which restrains and ostracizes non-English languages,so that the minority languages have always been considered a threat to the stability and unity of the nation and a menace to the harmonious development of society rather than precious language resources.Although China and the U.S. are remarkably different in political system and social culture, both countries are multi-ethnic countries with diverse nationalities, cultures and languages. Thus, when the two countries are confronted with the conflict between cultural pluralism and unity,they make the same choice to adopt bilingual education as a means to pursue the coexistence of pluralism and unity. With the deepening of China’s educational reform, the bilingual education for ethnic minorities are facing the unprecedented opportunity as well as challenge. With the guidance of "making the past serve the present and foreign things serve China", studying the development process of the U.S.bilingual education as well as its policy and drawing on the experience of its success and failure may provide us with inspiration, which is beneficial for us to develop bilingual education effectively and to make our own bilingual education policy.This paper consists of seven chapters which can be divided into four parts.The first chapter is Part I,which explains the reason for this study and its benefits, define the related terms and introduce the research achievements at home and abroad; From chapter2to5is Part II, in which the history of the U.S. bilingual education policy is divided into four different development stages with analysis of its background and driving factors from political, economic and cultural perspectives. The sixth chapter is the third part.In this part, this paper analyzes the characteristics and experience of the development of the U.S. bilingual education policy. The fourth part of this paper is chapter seven. Based on the analysis in chapter six, the paper points out the inspiration which boosts the development of the bilingual education policy in China, and in the end, the paper offers suggestions to the bilingual education policy making.