Zero Barrier Bilingual Education First International Conference  

25-28 October 2011. 

Jinghong City, Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan, China.
The conference had discussed current world trends in bilingual education and pedagogy, results of practical experiments, development of approaches to bilingual instruction and other related academic issues, in order to better serve minority groups. The attendees have opportunity to observe first hand a Zero Barrier MLE session in the rural village setting.

Contact Keith Slater at keith_slater@sil.org for more information.

什么是零障碍双语教学？

What is Zero Barrier Bilingual Education?

在学前教育阶段，以民语教育为主，汉语学习为辅，使学生在学前阶段母语得到较好发展的同时，汉语水平得到相应发展，极大限度降低少数民族学生接受学校教育的语言障碍。

At the preschool stage, these students start with minority language education, supplemented by Mandarin-Chinese. They develop their mother tongue language and at the same time Mandarin-Chinese level is developed correspondingly, thus greatly reducing the language barriers placed in front of the minority students in their primary school education.

This paper introduces a bilingual project devised for Bai minority preschoolers presently being carried out in a mountain village in Jianchuan County. In this village,children have had a long record of poor educational achievement and minimal progress beyond compulsory education requirements.  Many of the villagers interviewed during a household survey carried out in 2002/3 before work started on the preschool program said they felt unengaged by the whole educational process. Several said that working in the fields with their parents was more interesting and more fruitful than going to school. They also hated being cooped up in the classroom all day. My own classroom observations at that time revealed several reasons why students in rural preschools and primary schools are generally not very motivated about school ....

 The educational foundations of the Bai preschool program - Liz Billard PhD, Grad. Dip. Chinese Studies (This paper is based on work done while as a member of East Asia Group, SIL International, People’s Republic of China)