Mother Tongue-based Literacy Programmes: Case Studies of Good ...

they were persuaded of its value (they had no collective experience of past successful programmesto have such confidence), but because they trusted the programme organizers. They soon saw theexcitement and enthusiasm of the children who went to Kam school, in contrast to before when theywent reluctantly to Chinese-only classrooms. One grandmother of a Kam BEPP student put it like this:“I think it’s good for our children to start their studies in Dong and then transition intoMandarin Chinese. The children’s study of Dong will help our stories and songs to bepreserved. I hope this project will continue to develop in our village.”PolicyAt present, the Rongjiang Education Office does not have a policy of language and education thatexplicitly promotes the use of minority nationality languages in the classrooms of formal primaryschools. The Kam pilot project has benefited from the Rongjiang County Office’s approval of the bilingualeducation experiment for Kam children at Zaidang. As indicated above, an additional four schools wereencouraged to experiment with Kam preschool classes between 2002 and 2005. The results were positivein each school. However, without official Education Office approval and financial support at the countylevel, pilot project organizers have little chance of maintaining and extending this kind of multilingualeducation to Kam children in other communities in Guizhou Province.ChallengesLearning Chinese LiteracyProbably the greatest challenge to the Kam/Mandarin Bilingual Education Programme is the fact that,as designed, it falls into the category of “early-exit bilingual education” which multilingual educationscholars from around the world consider a “weak” programme. In research studies conducted elsewhere,a general condition of success for minority language learners in the national language education systemwas the amount of time they had in mother tongue instruction. In other words, the more time theyspent learning in their first language (along with the official school language) the better they did in andthrough the new language. Research suggests that the use of the minority language at least 50 percentof the time from grades 1 through 6 is the minimum for ensuring a strong multilingual educationprogramme that will yield positive results all the way through the secondary level of formal education,and beyond (cf. Thomas and Collier, 2002; Hakuta, Butler and Witt, 2000, Lindholm-Leary, 2001).As the Kam/Mandarin Bilingual Education Pilot Project is currently being implemented, percentages ofclassroom time with Kam instruction are as follows: Grade 1 (50%); Grade 2 (40%); Grade 3 (22%); Grade 4(10%); Grade 5 (10%); and Grade 6 (10%). Thus, the Kam/Mandarin programme will likely fall rather shortof the optimal results from bilingual education.However, minority community learners in China face a somewhat unique educational challenge:they must learn 4,000-6,000 Chinese characters for practical and functional Chinese literacy. Rotememory approaches are commonly used for this task and rote learning takes time. The challenge forthe Kam/Mandarin Bilingual Education Programme is to provide Kam learners with enough literacyand oral language practice in their mother tongue to help them develop higher thinking skills whilesimultaneously providing them with enough time to learn the required Chinese characters and gainconfidence in using the characters meaningfully for communication.[ 90 ]