Bilingual Kindergarten and Immersion Program:文献综述

 2022-09-09 15:51:55

Literature Review

Bilingual Education for Preschool Children in China: Immersion Program as a Promising Method

Wang Yizhou Jing Hengyi College Art 121

English education is compulsory in China for elementary, secondary and college students while more and more preschool English programs emerge these years although not officially required. Among these practices, bilingual kindergarten is one outstanding mode, which arranges systematic curriculum for second language teaching. Other patterns, including children training center, private children institutes, are also involved in preschool foreign language education.

Bilingual means using or expressed in two languages. Preschool describes children who have not yet gone to school, and their activities. Immersion lexically means to become completely involved in something. Immersion as a method of L2 education was invented in 1960s, Canada. In 1965, many English-speaking Canadian parents founded a special elementary school for their children in St. Lambert, a town near Montreal, where French is the superior language for life and working. The students there received French immersion program, in which all the class instructions were in French rather than English which is their mother tongue. The results of St. Lambert experiment turned out to be a great success that those students reached a high level of French competence after several years of exposure while maintained normal English development and shows no retardation in school subject. (Paulston, 1988)

The most supporting theory for early childhood L2 education is the Critical Period Hypothesis. This concept was firstly noted by neurosurgeon Penfield, and then it was adopted by Lenneberg. (Liu, 2003) After that, CP became a controversy topic among linguists triggering endless arguments on its existence, boundary and effectiveness, etc. Neurological researches have proven that CP is related to lateralization of language center in brain. Thus CP is a biologically determined window of opportunity during which time the brain is prepared to develop language. (Fromkin, 2007)

The UG supporters also claim that the end of CP is the just the time a person to some extent forfeits his ability of language learning. (Birdsong, 1999) In addition, premature learning is argued to be beneficial for language development because adults need to analyze more information than children thus younger learners are superior compared to adult peers. (Newport, 1990) Besides, evolutionary view, exercise hypothesis and some other traditional learning theories also support the CP hypothesis, thus it is widely accepted although lacks a complete empirical proof. (Liu, 2003) So we have reason to claim that the younger a child begins to learn L2, the more likely that she will be a successful learner and it is also the reason for preschool English education in China.

Bilingualism is not only valuable for social opportunities, achievements in schoolwork and other utilitarian aims, but also brings extra cognitive strength. There are many researchers report that bilingual children are better at inhibiting disturbing information while learning by tests including Dimensional Change Card Sorting (DCCS), Ambiguous Figures Task, Frog matrices Task, Flanker Task, etc. Also, bilingual children have better cognitive flexibility, working memory. And those advantages are proven to be biologically based. (Liamp; Zhou, 2015) Thus, we do not learn a second language because we have a high cognitive ability, on the contrary, we learn, and encourage young children to learn L2 because bilingualism enhances cognitive abilities. (Xie, 2015)

From a social and utilitarian perspective, L2 education in childhood is beneficial for childrenrsquo;s future developmental opportunities and culture awareness. English language is unquestionably dominant. (Zhu, 2003) Mastering English language generally means more working opportunities, higher income and other social privileges. In addition, because a language is part of the particular culture, the vehicle of the particular culture and a common base for people who share the same culture, learning a language is learning a culture. (Shu, 1996) Children who learn a foreign language are tending to have culture awareness from a young age.

剩余内容已隐藏，您需要先支付 10元 才能查看该篇文章全部内容！立即支付

以上是毕业论文文献综述，课题毕业论文、任务书、外文翻译、程序设计、图纸设计等资料可联系客服协助查找。

您可能感兴趣的文章