Environmental Education Curriculum in a Bilingual Education School in China

Canada in 1960s (Johnson and Swain 1997) and successfully spread throughout North America. In 1995 we started to apply similar programs to schools on mainland China. We worked with languages that are very different from each other. By the mid-1960s, it had become apparent to the anglophone population of the Canadian province of Quebec that economic survival would require high levels of proficiency in French. Although many students had studied French in school, most found that their skills were insufficient to work with the language or to socialize with francophone speakers. As a result, their school boards attempted to introduce French as a second language by trying alternative approaches such as teaching French through other subjects. With the globalization of both the economy and information networks, English has acquired a higher status as a language of international communication. Although a majority of Chinese public schools provide instruction in English, they emphasize grammar, memorization, and drills. Consequently, they have not provided learners with sufficient skills to effectively communicate with English speakers (Jiang 1995). Many of the motives for starting immersion programs in public elementary and secondary schools in Qingdao City were similar to the reasons North American educators had for introducing bilingual education courses of study in their own schools. Professor Hong De Jiang, the director of an immersion program in China, was frustrated that despite having six to twelve years of English language learning, the English oral proficiency of high school graduates was lagging behind their reading and writing skills (1995). In the spring of 1995, he created a committee to explore alternative forms of English education and to consider the possibility of establishing a bilingual program for first-graders at eleven public schools in Qingdao City. Students in the program would be taught a variety of subjects in English with the goal of improving their English proficiency. In the fall of 1995, this program was approved by the Shandong Provincial Education Commission as one of the key research programs of basic education during the ninth five-year plan. At that time I was teaching English at a local university, and was invited to work as a member and principal investigator on the committee. We were unanimous in our belief that intense exposure to English at an early age would give the children time to develop better oral proficiency. In December of 2001, the first fifty students of the bilingual education program in Hai Bin Lu primary school were in grade six. We arranged their weekly English curriculum as shown in table 1. Unlike in Canada, Chinese classes are fixed and always have the same students, the same classroom, and the same curriculum. Each instructor teaches a different subject, based on a model of their choosing. As a research program committee member, I was to teach two hours of English science to fifty experimental students of Hai Bin Lu Primary School, each of which had studied English for five years. In the following article I describe and analyze this experience.

Field of study: Sociology