Sihong Chen (Blog post 3)
Bilingual education has gained lots of attention in America and Canada and now it has become a hot issue in China. So I want to talk about the development of bilingualism under Chinese contexts. I will begin with my classroom observation experience in one bilingual school in Beijing. When I was a senior in my university, my adviser always provided some opportunities for us to do some classroom observation in some schools in Beijing. I noticed that teachers in bilingual schools already began to infuse dual language into their curriculum. Students in class were exposed to English contexts as much as possible. English was used as instruction in many subjects, not only restricted to English class. Under this mode of instruction, students are expected to enhance their English but it seems that higher English competence is more important than their comprehension of Chinese which is their mother tongue.
