Reflections on the medium of instruction for ethnic minorities in Xinjiang: the case of bilingual schools in Urumqi

ABSTRACT

The medium of instruction (MoI) is regulated in the bilingual education of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in two ways. One requires most school subjects to be taught through Mandarin, whereas the other demands that all subjects be delivered with Mandarin as the MoI. A field trip to the capital city, Urumqi, was conducted in 2017 to investigate the implementation of the MoI as stated in the policy.

This paper first outlines the history of bilingual education in the region, with a focus on Chinese language education. It then investigates the change of MoI from the ethnic minority language to Mandarin Chinese. The two current modes of bilingual education in Xinjiang are also discussed in detail. The paper further examines the regulations on MoI through interviews with students and teachers from four Urumqi schools. Their understanding of the regulations on MoI usage demonstrates the difficulties of implementing such a policy, one initially proposed with good intentions. Through a thorough examination of official documents as well as interview data, this study shows the discrepancies between national and current regional policies, between planned aim and in-class practice, and between the transitional and balanced types of bilingual education.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingual education
• medium of instruction (MoI)
• Uyghurs
• Kazakhs
• Xinjiang
• Urumqi

Acknowledgement

The authors thank a postgraduate student and three researchers 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 contributors

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

Notes

1 Either ‘national common language’ or ‘Putonghua’ is used in official documents. This paper adopts ‘Mandarin’ for consistency.

2 As mentioned earlier, bilingual education for Chinese ethnic minorities is practised as trilingualism since English began to be offered in schools in 2002, and consequently the vague term ‘bi/trilingual education’ has been used in previous studies (e.g. Feng and Sunuodula 2009). Since the official term used in various documents in Xinjiang is still ‘bilingual education’, this study uses that term rather than the ‘trilingual education’ used in previous studies, including Feng and Sunuodula (2009) and Feng and Adamson (2018).

3 In the planned economy, all third-level graduates were allocated different jobs by the government. In other words, every graduate was guaranteed a job. Reforms allowing the market to influence recruitment started in the mid-1980s, and from 1993 gradually became the main mechanism for recruitment (Wang 2010). The policy of directed allocation (dingxiang fenpei; Shu 2013) was applied to ethnic minority students. For example, they were given priority allocation to relevant ethnic regions or organisations dealing with minority groups and issues.

4 The source text is: ‘国家通用语言文字教育基础薄弱地区学前教育阶段基本普及(puji)两年双语教育，义务教育阶段全面普及(puji)双语教育’ (National Conference on Ethnic Education 2015a). Although various interpretations can be given for ‘puji’ (meaning ‘fully implement’), it shows bilingual education has been unprecedentedly stressed.

5 Option 1 refers to all scientific subjects being taught in Mandarin; Option 2 requires all subjects other than Music and the ethnic minority language to be taught in Mandarin (Sunuodula and Cao 2014).

6 Please note that ‘leader’ is deliberately used as a very vague term to ensure the anonymity of participants. It can refer to any teacher or staff member with a leading role in the administrative system in an Urumqi school.

7 The university entry exam is so vital that subjects that are not counted in the results of this exam (e.g. Art, Music, PE) are usually compromised or even not taught at all, especially in the year before the exam. Therefore, this requirement ensures space for and continuity of English language learning even up to the final year of secondary school. There are considerably more teaching hours for English in other grades.

8 This unpublished document was for internal circulation among government officials only. It was obtained through personal communication.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Dublin City University (the DCU Faculty of Humanities and Social Science).