Conclusion and suggestions
With the occurrence of more internationalized schools and more so-called East-West Integrated Programs in these school in China, it seems that bilingual education has regained its steam in recent years although this form of education is not officially sanctioned by the government. The purpose of this type of bilingual education in the present Chinese context differs than that in some bilingual countries such as Canada; on the other hand, its purpose obviously goes beyond mere learning another language. Despite the fact that many schools do not have a justified strategy of their bilingual education models that work in the context of the schools, they have implemented some practices of bilingual education and these practices impact students’ learning, development, and achievement in both short and long terms. According the literature, it is clear that some considerations pertinent to a bilingual education model are extremely important as they could greatly benefit students in the school or harm the students in some cases if these key issues are not clarified to curriculum designers, teachers, as well as the students. For example, the principles of the additive model of bilingual education, but definitely not the subtractive model, should be applied in those aforementioned Chinese-English bilingual schools since the students in these schools should develop social and academic competences in both Chinese and English languages.
The literature tells that the benefits of bilingual education exceed the expectation of just learning more than one language. Yet the actualization of these benefits requires many sound decisions by the administrative team and curriculum leaders of the school when they design or adopt a bilingual model for the school. There are some good suggestions in the literature regarding how to allocate, integrate, or separate the two languages in the curriculum and how to draw on the strengths of both Chinese and English-speaking teachers. The CLIL model and many planning recommendations associated with the model are well documented in the literature. Therefore, these practical recommendations can be borrowed and modified by school leaders according to the Chinese text. The school leaders, however, should also consider current curricular policies in China when they try to create feasible solutions to bilingual education. Questions like when, what, and who to teach and learn bilingually in the school curriculum should be discussed, answered, and clarified to the staff in the first place. It is recommended that a language policy should be created in any of these Chinese-English bilingual schools so that all the key issues would have been well considered and written down as an official document to guide daily practices of bilingual teaching and learning in the school.
The benefits of bilingual education for Chinese students will be eventually brought about by effective teaching and learning in these Chinese-English bilingual schools. Therefore, besides the consideration of what bilingual model should be adopted, how teachers teach and how students learn bilingually in classrooms are also extremely important. Probably all grammatical, communicative, and cognitive approaches (Garcia, 2009) can find their ways into the classrooms in these Chinese-English bilingual schools, depending on different needs in varied programs, subjects, and students. Some good strategies of promoting literacy skills in both languages such as dual language learning projects or translanguaging learning projects can also be adopted. Translanguaging is defined as “hearing or reading of a lesson, a passage in a book or a section of work in one language and development of the work in the other language by discussion, writing, work sheet activities, experiments or group work” (Baker, 2000, p. 104). If a CLIL model is implemented in the school, then some specific methods of designing and teaching CLIL units or lessons could be learned and followed. Teaching monolingually well is already tough job for teachers, teaching bilingually is even more demanding. It is recommended that teachers in bilingual schools should learn and apply a range of teaching strategies to meet the needs of varied classes and students. One obviously related concern is teachers’ professional development in bilingual schools. The teachers should not only understand the bilingual education model within the particular school and its unique guiding principles and expectations in line with the context of the school, but also master general pedagogical strategies of bilingual teaching and learning. The topic of bilingual teachers’ professional development certainly deserves a full discussion on its own right at another time.
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