3.3 Longitudinal Continuity 13

3.4 The Xi’an 1997 Experiment: an Academic Level Simulation of the 1965 Program 14

4 Discussion 15

5 Conclusion 18

 1 Research Background

The earliest foreign language education for preschool children in China could be traced back to the age of Opium War. (Liao Daosheng, 2002) In recent decades, foreign language education for preschool children has become a hot topic. The number of kindergarten English class is on the unceasing increase, and bilingual kindergartens, qualified or unqualified, spring up around the country.

Every one of us knows the language-acquiring advantage of young children is much better than adults. And everyone who have been educated through elementary, secondary schools in China have the impression of the difficult English lessons at school, though few can handle most of the grammatical rules or achieve the linguistic goal set by the National Curriculum. 

A question remains in creative educator’s mind: can children acquire the foreign language during their childhood NATURALLY instead of INTENTIONALLY? This concern becomes the original intention of delivering bilingual programs for preschool children and in 1965, an experimental program was practiced in St. Lambert, Canada, which made the idea materialized. The successful result confirmed the practicality of bilingual kindergarten program, and the pattern spreads internationally from the Canadian town from the 1970s to now.  

In 1965 Quebec, the confrontation between English-speaking Canadians and French-speaking Canadians is more intense than today and this mutual hostile view affected their young children: French schools were unwilling to enroll English-speaking children in fear that English language brought by the children would wreck the purity of French language. Thus, the English-speaking parents became angry and demand a separated school for their children where all the school work should be conducted in French language thus the youngsters could develop the second language naturally during schooling. This radical experiment was guided by professor Wallace E. Lambert (1922-2009), G. Richard Tucker and other experts. In 1972, they published Bilingual Education of Children: The St. Lambert experiment to systematically introduce the experiment and they provide detailed statistics of the outcomes as well. The experiment begins in kindergarten and last recorded in Grade 4. 

In China, bilingual kindergarten programs appear from the end of last century in small and dispersed groups. Nowadays, their number is huge. Along with the develop of preschool bilingual program, relative questions arise: Do they have an educational goal? What curriculum do they adopt? How qualified are their teachers? Are they REAL bilingual? This paper could be pided into three parts. The first part analyses the theoretical value of bilingual kindergarten based on literature. The second part is a comparison work between 1965 St. Lambert experiment and current practices in China. The last part will provide an analyse to conclude. 

2 Theoretical Analysis

2.1 The Critical Period Hypothesis

Age always plays a vital role in language development, which is similar for the development of a child’s first language and his second or third language.

The notion of a ‘critical period’ for language was first suggested in the 1960s by psychologist Eric Lenneburg, who proposed that a number of human developments, among them language and walking, emerge according to a genetic schedule that is only partially specified, requiring experience to trigger the entire process. (Susan H. Foster-Cohen, 2002:96)