08 Bilingual education

Bilingual education

Bilingual education is bilingualism at the school level. It is not to be confused with bilingual child-raising. Bilingual education should involve teaching in two or more languages in a school, that is, more than one language as the medium of instruction for students to learn regular school subjects.

               There are a lot of successful model for bilingual education.

         1.    IMMERSION

         2.   MAINTENANCE / HERITAGE LANGUAGE

         3.   TWO-WAY / DUAL LANGUAGE

         4.   MAINSTREAM BILINGUAL

In immersion bilingual education the regular curriculum is taught to some extent in the target language, which can also be called Content-Based Foreign Language Teaching. If a program is called immersion, it may need to be confirmed that the curriculum meets the established criteria which is use L1 and L2 at the same time (L1 50% and L2 50%) It is a strict standard compared to most foreign language programs, but many studies have shown that immersion students did not lose any native level ability in L1 but rather gained academic and cognitive benefits from effective bilingual education programs.

          Maintenance or Heritage Language programs serve the purpose of preserving the ethnic identity, culture and language of minority group members. Though bilingual education their children can cope with the majority society without losing their roots.
Korean and Chinese schools in Japan are of this type. Since their students are mostly raised in Japan and hence native speakers of Japanese, with English also taught at least through secondary school, many of their graduates are bilingual or multilingual.

            Two-Way or Dual Language bilingual education is similar to immersion, but schools try to gather about the same number of minority and majority language students in each class in the program, and usually team teach about half of the curriculum in the native language of the minority and half in the native language of the majority language students.

            Mainstream Bilingual. this is often called Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) It serves children like majority students or temporary residents whose native language is an international language such as English. Schools are in societies where much of the population is already bilingual or multilingual (e.g. Singapore, Luxembourg) or where there are significant numbers of natives or expatriates wanting to become bilingual

And How about bilingual education in Thailand?

In Thai we often heard about English Program. (EP)

               English Program is famous program in Thailand for teaching bilingual students. Teaching and learning in English all subjects and the curriculum obtained approval from the Ministry of education. The EP class in Thailand usually has 2 teachers in each class: Foreign teacher and Thai teacher. Foreign teacher will lead the class and teaching while Thai teacher standing at the back and help students if need. 

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