Bilingual Education Among Minority Nationalities in China: a Study of the Naxi Pilot Project At Yilong, Yunnan

This article reports on the test results of a pilot project (PP), undertaken in 1986 at the Yilong school of northwestern Yunnan. The project involved teaching Naxi (a Sino-Tibetan language) and Chinese literacy to monolingual Naxi children. It aimed at facilitating the integration of these children into the regular curriculum. The objective of this paper is to compare the biliteracy and the regular Chinese literacy programs to determine if biliteracy had a positive effect on these minority language students. In 1992, we tested 60 students in oral Naxi/Chinese (production) and written Chinese (production and overall quality). The experimental group comprised 30 students of the PP (grades 5 and 6) and the control group, 30 of the regular parallel classes (R). Test score results in oral Naxi productivity were highly significant, suggesting that PP students were more verbal in L 1 than their R peers and reflecting higher self-esteem. However, there were no clear cross-language correlations for the oral skills. In spite of fewer periods of formal literacy instruction, the PP students' written holistic and structural scores in Chinese matched those of the regular classes. The biliteracy program, as a direct result of the PP's academic success, is currently (in 1996) an integrated part of Yilong's primary school curriculum. Since the early eighties, the Central Government of China has sponsored various bilingual programs among its 55 minority ethnic groups or nationalities (as referred to by Chinese scholars)' in order to facilitate the integration of students into the regular (Chinese) curriculum. For example, the multi-ethnic Province of Yunnan has 24 minority nationalities which constitute one third of the provincial population (or 10 million people). Therefore, this province was fertile ground for the government to implement a variety of bilingual programs at the elementary level.