Bilingual Education for Majority-Language Students: A Study of the Factors Affecting the Initiation and Implementation of a Municipality-wide Chinese-English Bilingual Education Project in Shanghai.

摘要

This study concerns the provision of bilingual education involving a foreign language as a medium of instruction for majority-language students through an in-depth analysis of a municipality-wide Chinese-English bilingual education project in Shanghai, which is officially named the Bilingual Education Experiment in Primary and Secondary Schools of Shanghai (henceforth "The Project"). The Project can be characterised as a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) programme. The initiation of The Project in 2001 enabled Shanghai to become the first region in Mainland China to expend regional-government endeavours to provide bilingual education involving English as a medium of instruction in the public pre-tertiary sector. As of December 2006, 140,000 students at about 300 primary and secondary schools participate in The Project according to best available official statistics.;The two foci of this study are to identify the factors that contributed to the initiation of The Project and to explore the possible directions The Project may take in its future development through a reality check on the status quo of the implementation of The Project.;Drawing upon data from questionnaire surveys, documents and interviews, the study finds that four factors, namely (1) the state's subtle approval for The Project, (2) little exposure to English for its effective learning outside school, (3) social demands for English skills in the local social reward system and (4) stakeholders' perceptions related to English learning, contributed to the initiation of The Project. The pivotal role of the state's approval in initiating a CLIL project as a regional-government endeavour within a danwei system is highlighted through a comparison of the Presence of factors contributing to BE in Guangzhou.;The reality check concerning the implementation of The Project reveals that all eight areas examined (see the second conceptual framework) except stakeholders' support for bilingual education provision might constitute potential problem areas. To minimize the impeding effects of those potential problem areas on The Project's implementation, Shanghai may need to learn experiences from comparable contexts, where CLIL-type bilingual education programmes similar to The Project are operating.