Bilingual education for the Tujia: the case of Tujia minority schools in Xiangxi autonomous prefecture

ABSTRACT

A field trip to Xiangxi Autonomous Prefecture was conducted in early 2016, to investigate bilingual education for the Tujia in China. Through observation of language classes, along with interviews with local students, parents and bilingual teachers, this paper investigates the current bilingual education situation for the Tujia in three schools. A number of unpublished government documents and historical records from local county archives are also analysed to support the findings. The paper will first outline the historical development of bilingual education for the Tujia in Xiangxi Autonomous Prefecture. Secondly, it will investigate the textbooks, the medium of instruction and the teaching approach employed in the language classroom. Then it will scrutinise the attitudes of local teachers, students and parents towards bilingual education, to provide a full picture of bilingual education for the Tujia students. This study sheds light on the future of bilingual education development for the Tujia ethnic group, and proposes an analytical model to capture the current situation and indicate the future development of bilingual education from the pedagogical perspective.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingual education
• Tujia
• minority schools
• language attitudes

Acknowledgements

The authors thank two postgraduate students for their help with data collection and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Dr Qi Zhang is an assistant professor in Chinese at Dublin City University, Ireland. She received her MA in Durham University and PhD in Newcastle University. She has been conducting research on bilingual education for Chinese ethnic minorities with Prof. Ting Yang. Her main research interests are language attitudes and Chinese as a second or foreign language.

Prof. Ting Yang, associate professor from Southwest University, China. His main research interests are cultures and literature of Chinese ethnic minorities.

ORCID

Qi Zhang http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1061-4036

Notes

1 The Tujia call themselves ‘bizika’. ‘Bizi’ refers to the Tujia, and the meaning of ‘ka’ is equivalent to an ethnicity. The name the Ba people call themselves also contains the syllable ‘bi’ (Yang 2004).

2 It was part of the Republic of China on the mainland between 1912 and 1948.

3 The linguistic features are detailed in Peng and Ye (1985) and Tian (2010).

4 ‘Nine-Year’ refers to the nine years of compulsory education in China. This school consists of Year 1–6 for primary education and Year 7–9 for junior high school.

5 Maogusi refers to an exorcistic play of ‘dressing up as ancestors’ after the annual ancestral worship rite in the early spring. It is an archaic form of primitive dance, music and fertility worship of the ancient Tujia people (Ho 2002, 152).

6 Baishou Ge literally means ‘songs for the hand-waving dance’, which is one of the evening ritual activities (Ho 2002, 153).

7 Tima refers to the ritual master in the ritual activities (Ho 2002, 153) and Jing translates as ‘scripture’. Therefore, these are the scripts used by the ritual master.

8 The National Putonghua Proficiency Test (Putonghua Shuiping Ceshi) is an official test of fluency in standard Chinese for native speakers of Chinese. The passing grades are divided into three classes: first class upper and lower, second class upper and lower, third class upper and lower (Wang, Liu, and Wei 2007).

9 Students take an examination at the end of Grade 9 in a nine-year school (Year 3 in a junior high school). The exam result decides which senior high school a student is allocated to. The better the result, the better the school the student can attend, and consequently the better chance he/she has of attending university.

10 Southwest Mandarin is mainly spoken in the provinces of Sichuan, Guizhou, Yunnan, Guangxi, Hubei, Hunan, Shaanxi and Jiangxi (Li 2009). There are around 1.9 million users of this language in the counties of Yongshun, Longshan, Sangzhi and the city of Zhangjiajie (Chen and Bao 2007). The main feature of this Mandarin is that the ancient entering tone (rusheng) is nowadays pronounced using the rising tone (yangping). Details of the phonological features can be seen in Li (2004; see also Huang 1986; Chen and Bao 2007; Li 2009).

11 Due to the number of left-behind children in the study, ‘parents’ may refer to grandparents or other extended family members who look after the children while their parents are away.

12 Only the Tujia language and Mandarin were mentioned in the interview. The researchers did not intervene to mention English, in order to allow students to express their views freely.

13 The most noticeable surnames for the Tujia people are Peng, Tian, Qin and Xiang (Brassett and Brassett 2005). The same information was also derived from the interviews in the current study.

Additional information

Funding

The research was supported by the DCU Faculty of Humanities and Social Science’s Publication Scheme and Southwest University, China.