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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Domestic Research
2.1.1 Research on Multilingual Education of Ethnic Groups
As the reform and opening up develops, with greater globalization, the language life ofethnic minorities in China presents the characteristics of multilingualism-the integration ofethnic languages, Chinese and foreign languages. It prompts the continuous emergence ofresearch on multilingual education of ethnic groups in domestic academic circles, mainlyreflected in five respects.
In the first place, the view of language education of multilingualism has been constantlyconfirmed and improved. Luo (2001) believes that equal emphasis should be placed on theethnic languages, Chinese and foreign languages, to open up a new situation of languageeducation in multi-ethnic areas in western China. Moreover, Ge and Gao (2003) propose toestablish a language institute in the west to train professional teachers, research talents ofChinese and English teaching of ethnic minorities and give play to the advantages of multipleethnic language resources. In recent years, many researchers have pointed out that it isparticularly important to carry out multilingual education in ethnic areas of China. Accordingto Su (2013), this is because multilingual education is closely related to the construction of aharmonious society and culture, while Liu (2015) believes that multilingual education canmeet the needs of the diversify of language abilities. However, Xu and Zhang (2015) find thatdiversified language education reflects China’s demonstrative role in supporting the UN’sproposition of linguistic diversity.
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2.2 Foreign Research on Multilingual Education
In the 16th century, Erasmus, Netherlandish humanist and theologian, set up a trilingualcommittee in Lewin, Belgium, to teach Christianity, philosophy and theology in Latin, Greekand Hebrew. However, multilingual education emerged as a direction of western academicresearch after the Second World War. Generally speaking, foreign research on multilingual education is generally divided into three stages.From the Second World War to the 1960s and 1970s, multilingual education researchemerged. After the Second World War, many countries began to take measures to protect thelanguage rights of minorities, which started the transition from a single language educationmodel to a bilingual, multilingual education model. In academia, concepts like “bilingualism”,and “multilingualism” were increasingly used, and the use of terms like “immigrants”, “ethnicminorities”, and “native speakers” was considered racist and disapproved of. At that time,Khubchandani (1966), Dodson (1972), Rado (1976), Giles (1977), Shuy (1978), Zachariev(1978) and other scholars all paid active attention to various problems (e.g. political andeconomic benefits, learning difficulties and employment opportunities) brought about bylanguage contact in the process of bilingual and multilingual education.
The development stage of multilingual education research is from the late 1970s to theend of the 20th century. In the 1970s, the trend of economic globalization was strengthened,and the influx of immigrants led to a large number of language contacts, which graduallychanged the repressive attitudes of many countries towards minority languages. Educationalinstitutions gradually began to focus on the bilingual and multilingual education of native orimmigrant children. Rosen and Burgess (1980), Skutnabb-kangas (1981), Cummins (1982),Skutnabb-kangas and Cummins (1988), Tollefson (1991), Baker (1993), Broeder (1998),Tulasiewicz and Adams (1998) and other researchers concentrated on the phenomenon ofbilingual and multilingualism, especially in the field of education. The schola
