Tibetan students in Shenyang, Liaoning Province join a lunar new year party on February 18, 2015. Photos: CFP
 

Students take a break from class in the Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Gansu Province on September 6, 2013. Photo: CFP

Dekyi Drolkar, 47, urges her two daughters to speak Putonghua (standard Chinese) to each other at home and in school.

"Instead of being worried about their competence in their mother tongue, I care more whether my girls will be alienated from society if they can only speak Tibetan," the determined mother told the Global Times while her younger daughter, Yangzom, interpreted for her.

She even sent Yangzom, who came in second place in her junior high school entrance exam, to language classes specially designed for Tibetan students in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, a city some 2,500 kilometers away from Lhasa, capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region.

The 15-year-old Yangzom had previously learned Chinese at a bilingual primary school in Jiedexiu township, Shannan prefecture, Tibet Autonomous Region.

By 2014, over 96 percent of students in Tibet received bilingual education, including approximately 300,000 primary school students, 125,000 junior high school students and 56,000 senior high school students, according to data released by the regional education department.

Challenging classes

At primary schools in Tibet's rural areas, most courses, except Chinese lessons, are delivered in Tibetan, while in cities and townships where Putonghua is more widely spoken, only Tibetan language lessons are taught in the student's native tongue, explained Cai Shoukuan, Party chief of Shannan's education bureau.

But the majority of classes in the region's secondary schools are taught in Chinese, Cai added.

A total of 1,217 primary schools, 93 junior high schools and 29 senior high schools in Tibet provided bilingual teaching by the end of 2014, respectively covering 97.06 percent, 97.46 percent and 92.88 of corresponding students, the Xinhua News Agency reported on March 18.

Kelsang Ngodrup, principal of Shannan No.1 Primary School, told the Global Times that pupils learn the Chinese and Tibetan languages in seven or eight lessons every week.

Yangzom recalled that at her primary school she was taught pinyin, recited classical Chinese poems and wrote compositions.

To improve their oral Chinese, their Chinese teacher asked them to read texts aloud for the first 10 minutes of class, she said.

"We often played a text-based role-playing game in Chinese class, which can help us understand the texts," she added.

"We were also encouraged to chat with classmates in Chinese at the primary school," Tashi Padma, a 15-year-old girl at Naidong High School in Shannan, told the Global Times.

Students like her who live in rural areas and rarely hear people speaking Chinese, find picking up the language very difficult.

"Text analysis is challenging, and I often got confused trying to figure out the main idea of an article, the topic of a paragraph and connecting paragraphs," Tashi Padma said, recollecting how hard learning Chinese was at primary school.

"It was more difficult to comprehend certain ancient poems and verses featuring concise words and implicit images," Tashi Padma noted, citing the Chinese moral classic Dizigui (Standards for Being a Good Pupil and Child, a children's primer written some 300 years ago on Confucian values and guidelines) as an example of a tricky text.

According to Kelsang Ngodrup, students are required to read fairy tales written in Chinese at first, and then recite ancient poems as well as simple verses like Dizigui at the intermediate level, adding that students hand in book reports on a regular basis to develop their reading ability.

But still, these primary school lessons do not seem enough to prepare the pupils for further study.

"Once I went to high school, it was demanding for me to keep up with the rest of the class when most courses, began to be delivered in Chinese," Tashi Padma said. "I spent half a year getting used to the Chinese-language lectures."

Thinking of her first days at high school, Yangzom echoed Tashi Padma and added that she barely caught what her Han schoolmates said when they spoke quickly.

Cultural concerns

For Dekyi Drolkar, a good command of Chinese is a basic requirement for her children to establish a foothold in wider Chinese society. "What if they are swindled? What if they lag behind their Han peers when hunting for jobs?"

Tashi Paljor, 17, is acutely aware of the necessity of learning Chinese, as he has attended classes especially for Tibetan students all through his high school in relatively developed provinces - Liaoyang No.1 High School in Northeast China's Liaoning Province and then the High School Attached to Beijing University of Technology in Beijing.

"Chinese is essential to my school life. I have to speak Putonghua when communicating with my Han classmates and teachers," Tashi Paljor said. "Even the set language of smart phones is also Chinese."

However, the benefits of speaking the majority language failed to soothe the young man's fears that his mother tongue might be deteriorating.

"The first time I realized my ability to use my native language was poor was when I wrote a Tibetan composition at Grade 8 and some words escaped me," he recalled.

Now he and his friends make an effort to speak Tibetan as much as possible at weekends. "Those who mix Tibetan and Chinese words together are often teased by us," he said.

He now also practices his Tibetan penmanship at weekends and frequently reads Tibetan-language books about Tibet's history, although the books written in Tibetan are far harder to find than Chinese ones.

He said that he has tried to strike a balance between speaking Chinese and Tibetan. "Chinese will help my future work, while Tibetan is my root," he said.

Dekyi Drolkar seems to have more confidence in the next generation than the children themselves have. "I have never been worried that they will lose their mother tongue, as they are still immersed in a Tibetan-speaking environment back home," she explained.