Theory and practice of bilingual education in China: lessons from Liangshan Yi autonomous prefecture

ABSTRACT

Bilingual education in China’s ethnic minority regions can serve as a test case of the ability of governments to maintain linguistic pluralism in the face of rapid social change and the spread of standard national languages. In pursuit of its policy of multilingualism, since the late 1970s China has conducted ambitious programs of bilingual education for many of its 55 officially recognized shaoshu minzu, or ‘minority nationalities,’ including the Nuosu, a subgroup of the Yi minzu or ‘nationality.’ Interviews, questionnaires, and class observations in 17 elementary and secondary schools in the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in southwestern Sichuan assessed the success or failure of bilingual education in the Standard Chinese (‘Mandarin’) and Nuosu languages. While there was still widespread support for the concept of bilingual education, results did not match expectations: few students in bilingual programs left school with functional literacy in the Nuosu language. We attribute this problem to two kinds of factors: structurally, bilingual education has failed to adapt to changing linguistic landscapes in Liangshan; and practically, programs have suffered from inadequate teacher training, outdated textbooks, and omission of Nuosu language from entrance examinations. We propose reforms that would bring bilingual education up to date for contemporary society.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingual education
• China
• Yi
• Nuosu

Acknowlegements

This research was supported by 12th 5-year plan young educational researcher grant #CMA 150134 from the National Social Science Fund of China, entitled ‘Predicaments and Reforms of the “Two Models” of Bilingual Education in Liangshan in Light of Globalization.’ We thank Feng Shuang, Wang Huan, Muge Yuebu, Luo Qingchun, and Xu Yanlin for invaluable help with the research, and Sarala Puthuval and two anonymous readers for perceptive comments on an earlier draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Aga Rehamo is Associate Professor of Educational Science at Sichuan Normal University in Chengdu. A member of the Nuosu Yi ethnic group, she worked as a village and township school teacher for several years beginning in 2000. She received her Ph.D. in pedagogy from Beijing Normal University in 2013, for a dissertation on the predicament of Nuosu Yi education. From 2015 through 2017 she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington, Seattle. Stevan Harrell is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and of Environmental and Forest Sciences, and formerly Adjunct Professor of Chinese, at the University of Washington. He has written and edited numerous books and articles about ecology, ethnicity, and education in southwest China. He was part of a group of Nuosu, Han, and foreign educators who founded the Yangjuan Primary School, which served the Nuosu villages of Yangjuan and Pianshui in Yanyuan County from 2000-2016. He was founding President of Cool Mountain Education Fund, which since 2005 has provideded middle school, high school, and university scholarships to graduates of Yangjuan School.

Notes

1 The Chinese state officially divides the population into 56 minzu, variously translated as ‘nationalities’ or ‘ethnic groups,’ but corresponding to neither term in common English usage. 55 ‘minority nationalities’ or shaoshu minzu constitute about 9% of the population, around 120 million people. The Yi, of which the Nuosu described in this article are a sub-group, have a population of around 9 million.

2 In this article, we use ‘Yi’ and ‘Nuosu’ interchangeably when referring to education in Liangshan, since they are translations of each other in the Chinese and Nuosu languages respectively. We use ‘Han’ to refer to members of the Han minzu (ethnic group or ‘nationality’), and ‘Chinese’ to refer to the Chinese or Han language.

3 The full text of the questionnaires is included in the supplementary material.

4 Interviews were conducted primarily in Standard and Sichuanese Chinese, occasionally using Nuosu.

5 The Chinese term zhongxue refers to grades 7–12, divided into chuzhong, grades 7–9, which we translate as ‘middle school,’ and gaozhong, grades 10–12, which we translate as ‘high school.’ Schools that offer both middle school and high school we refer to as ‘secondary schools.’

6 This is similar to the ambivalent attitude toward the usefulness of minority language education that Cobbey (2007, 187) reports for Dai parents and educators in Sipsong Panna.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by 12th 5-year plan young educational researcher grant [number CMA 150134] from the National Science Council of the People’s Republic of China, entitled “Predicaments and Reforms of the “Two Models” of Bilingual Education in Liangshan in Light of Globalization.”