from the Guardian Weekly

Forced to learn a language of failure

As China’s planners roll out a bilingual education policy across their vast country, the damage it is doing in remote minority-language-speaking communities is being overlooked, says Anwei Feng

Friday February 11, 2005

In its long history of minority education, China has engaged its 50 or so minority groups in bilingual education with an officially proclaimed aim to produce bilinguals with a strong competence in Putonghua (standard Chinese) and their home languages. The stated outcome of this policy is for minority groups to be able to communicate with, and ideally assimilate into, mainstream society.

The concept of bilingualism has, therefore, a long association with minority groups and bilingual education for these groups has undergone its course of trials, disasters and hopes reflecting the political realities of the country. To the Han majority, which comprises about 92% of the total population, bilingualism has remained a remote notion and it has hardly, if ever, appeared in their education literature.

But over the past few years this has changed drastically. Bilingualism is now widely seen by the Han majority as a useful tool for improving foreign language skills, particularly English, and for developing a workforce that combines specialised knowledge with foreign language skills.

Across the country, particularly in major cities such as Shanghai and Beijing and the special economic zones, a school system is rapidly being developed in which English as well as standard Chinese are used as the languages of instruction. From kindergartens to tertiary institutions, bilingual education has become part of the everyday vocabulary not only of educationists but also ordinary people. Catalytic factors, such as China’s firm belief in its “open-door” policy, membership of the World Trade Organisation in 2001 and the successful bid for the 2008 Olympic Games, have played a key role in promoting English and Chinese bilingualism, which looks certain to reshape China’s education system as a whole. In what looks like a natural response to the English and Chinese bilingual movement, some educators have come up with the notion of trilingualism for minority groups.This is defined as the development of talents in mastering three languages (sanyu jiantong). To these educators, as long as there is the need, learning a third language (in this case a foreign language that is not in widespread use in minority regions) should be as simple as the sum: two (minority home language and standard Chinese) plus one (a foreign language) equals three (sanyu jiantong).
Trilingualism is by no means an unusual phenomenon and proves a useful concept in some countries in Europe, Africa and Asia. However, for any trilingual programme to be effective, it is important to examine the specific context and the implications for linguistic minority children and to create necessary conditions for its implementation. That process of examination and debate does not appear to be taking place in the literature on minority education in China.

Recent reports from minority areas reveal several hidden issues that need addressing. The first is the transition children go through from early schooling in their mother tongue to learning subjects in standard Chinese later in their school careers. This transition is often reported as being unsmooth, with some children dropping out of school.

A second issue is that a large percentage of minority pupils, many of whom live in remote areas, rarely or never have a chance to study a foreign language in primary or even secondary schools, usually because of lack of resources. Elsewhere in China, learning a foreign language starts at primary school and sometimes even earlier.

And where minority students do get access to foreign language teaching they have an additional hurdle to face. In most cases, the EFL textbooks they use are standardised nationwide. These textbooks carry explanations or translations in standard Chinese. This increases considerably the difficulty of learning the foreign language because the “intermediary language” they rely on is in fact a language of which they are not native speakers. Many of them have to mentally retranslate it into their mother tongue in the learning process.

These difficulties are compounded by other factors: a shortage of qualified standard Chinese and EFL teachers; the unfavourable economic conditions that keep minority children out of classrooms to help parents in busy seasons; the struggle of those pupils with two new languages, and thus two new cultures (the Han majority culture and a distant foreign culture); and inappropriate management and policies in minority education.

As many minority children find it difficult to follow the school curriculum it becomes harder for them to gain the grades necessary to get into tertiary education. They therefore rely on the government’s “favour policies” for university places. (Regional or provincial governments seek to ensure that quotas of minority students are enrolled into tertiary institutions, often by lowering the pass level in the nationwide entrance examinations.) Once in university, these students are placed in an exam system that includes compulsory English language testing and they perform less well than their majority counterparts. Many of them have to re-sit these exams repeatedly for certification.

This in turn affects their self-esteem, confidence and overall performance. It is often reported that some minority students consider themselves inferior to others (ziren buru) and undervalue their own cultures and languages. Some take great pains to hide their ethnic identities by not wearing their ethnic clothes and by changing their accents.

Loss of sense of worth and identity as observed by many educators is contrary to the aim of bilingual education. At the heart of minority education are the notions of equity, self-confidence and empowerment that help to develop in all students a secure sense of identity and self-esteem so as to enable them to participate competently in the education process. The outcome of minority education should be academically and personally empowered individuals who acquire control over their own lives and immediate environment and who can transform from a superior-inferior mentality to collaborative relationships where their identities are affirmed.

If these aims for minority education are to be achieved in trilingual education in China, the challenges being faced by minority students need to be debated from different perspectives with a view to the unique contexts of minority groups in the country.

However, the absence of discussions about the impact of the majority concept of bilingualism (expressed in the “two plus one equals three” formula) on minority groups may well be a product of the prevailing assimilation mentality. This portrays minority languages and cultures as primitive, inferior and thus dispensable. An open discussions of these issues will help shed light on the theory of trilingualism and the assimilation mentality. It will also allow stakeholders to develop minority education programmes that empower minority children.