The Bilingual Learning and School Readiness of Uyghur Preschoolers in Xinjiang, China

• In Event: 56.052 - International Perspectives on Bilingualism in Early Childhood Education and Care Programs

Abstract

Educating young children of ethnic minority groups who speak languages other than Mandarin Chinese (the national language) has been a challenge to China, a land that is home to 56 ethic groups. A major concern of contemporary Chinese society, bilingual education has in the past several years received unprecedented notice and support from the state and efforts have been made to offer ethnic minority children at least one year of bilingual early childhood education in ethic minority autonomous regions. However, little is known about the impacts of bilingual preschool and the bilingual experiences of these children. One of the largest minority groups in China is the Uyghurs, a Turkic ethnic group who have an autonomous homeland in Xinjiang in the Northwest of China.

In this paper, we explore the bilingual language development and learning experience of Uyghur children who have been receiving early childhood education both in Uyghur (their native language) and Mandarin Chinese. We followed the language development trajectories of Uyghur children’s learning of Mandarin Chinese. The participants in the study were 376 Uygur children aged from three- to six-years-old from 12 public bilingual preschools in urban and rural preschools in the autonomous region of Xinjinang. The study was quasi-experimental, as our team provided the schools with good quality bilingual picture books and gave the teachers some training on how to implement picture book-afforded activities.

Findings from our corpus-based longitudinal analyses and cross-sectional analyses suggest that: 1) the Uyghur children in our study who received a 18-to-36 month bilingual preschool education show momentum in the development of both Uyghur (their native language) and Mandarin (their second language),which suggests the positive impact of bilingual schooling experience on their bilingual competencies; 2) more specifically, children in our study who are immersed in a learning environment afforded with good-quality bilingual picture books and teacher-guided reading are significantly more competent in Mandarin and Uygur, and on other measures on school readiness tests; 3) Uyghur children’s Mandarin proficiency, particularly their understandings and use of Mandarin academic language, is a significant indicator of their school readiness; 4) there are some developmental characteristics that we found in Uyghur children’s learning of Mandarin, such as the challenges they encounter in learning Mandarin verbs, that should be brought to the attention of early childhood educators for a better understanding of bilingual children. The results are encouraging for Chinese early childhood educators who may doubt if bilingual education is beneficial for minority children. These results enrich existing understandings about bilingual children’s bilingual learning with empirical findings from Chinese Uygur children, a population group that has not been extensively studied.

Authors

• Jing Zhou, East China Normal University

• Zhang Li, East China Normal University

• Chang Liu, University of Georgia - Athens

• Lanbin Min, Xinjiang Normal University