Peer Assistance in an English Immersion Context in China

Abstract

Since the late 1990s, English immersion education has been advocated by researchers and teachers in the mainland of China. In an immersion programme, the learners from a common background of a majority or dominant language receive their initial primary and later secondary education through the medium of a target foreign or second language for much or most of the curriculum. The aims of such a program are that within several years children will reach high levels of proficiency in this target language, while adequately learning the curriculum content and maintaining and developing their first language. Such programs began in Canada in the mid-1960s for English speakers to learn French under pressure from parents for their children to become bilingual (Lambert & Tucker, 1972). The generally positive and sometimes surprising evaluation of curriculum learning (Swain & Lapkin, 1983) quickly led to immersion being seen as a form of successful bilingual education which could be used in other contexts (Genesee, 1987) and in many other countries for a wide range of languages, including learning English in Germany, Hungary, Singapore and Japan (Johnson & Swain, 1997). A wide range of types of programs for immersion schooling have been developed, varying from total immersion (for the entire curriculum except the mother tongue as a timetabled subject) to different degrees of partial immersion, to beginning at kindergarten or various primary levels, and including heritage language programs (e.g., to develop Catalan in Spain — an indigenous language — alongside the national language of Spanish), but they all have the explicit aim of developing bilingualism in a kind of dual language program (Christian, 2011) with some features that overlap with content-based second language teaching since a major concern is that students should learn the curriculum content (Lyster, 2011).