Teaching material
In fact, in order to solve the problems of teaching materials, “ 1959 National Minority Ethnic Conference Group Publishing Conference established a regulation that every middle school and normal school should use national standard textbooks, but in addition these schools should adopt self-edited minority materials as supplementary teaching aids” (Gu, 2012, pp.2540-2541). Since then, many special organizations have been set up to edit and publish teaching materials in ethnic languages. Up until 1991, translations and publications in 30 languages from 24 minority groups had reached 1800 and totaled 80 million volumes (Lin, 1997).
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However, many problems still exist in the compiling of ethnic literacy as well as in the translation and publication of these materials. First, most translators and compilers of these teaching materials are not proficient in two languages and they have little prior knowledge about the subject and know little about the disciplinary knowledge. They rarely have any chances to receive in-service training and have little access to reference books. “Except for the Mongolian, Korean and Tibetan languages, there are no government organizations and supervision of textbooks compiled for minority school, and the textbooks are often not tested before use” (Lin, 1997). Moreover, the number of people working on editing and compiling minority language textbooks falls far short of our expectations. It is hard to recruit people to this field.
In addition, the quality of the textbooks cannot be guaranteed. Developing the textbooks for primary and middle school subjects in China required “the concentrated effort of several generations, including millions of teachers and scholars from every branch of learning familiarizing themselves with foreign teaching materials and consolidating China’s long experience of classroom instruction” (Ma, 2007, pp.19). Therefore, it is hard for editors to accurately translate the original meaning and the inconsistency of some translation may lead to difficulties in teaching and learning.
As for the content of the instructional materials, knowledge about the minorities themselves is not incorporated into the curriculum. “China has a centralized curriculum which is designed by the State Education Commission for all schools to follow” (Lin, 1997, pp. 197). Even students in minority areas use the same set of textbooks and the subject areas are predetermined, leaving less space and flexibility for local schools (Lin, 1997). Culture and values of minorities are seldom mentioned and the psychology of minority students is not always taken into consideration because textbooks used in minority regions are mainly translated from the teaching materials in Mandarin.