There are states which speak other languages rather than English and want their children to be taught other languages giving rise to bilingual education. Bilingual education makes learners comfortably interact with foreign people who speak little English.
Pros:
1. Creates an opportunity for early diversity: Bilingual education gives learners an opportunity to celebrate cultural diversity and be able to interact with more people from different cultures.
2. Blueprint for future opportunities: Learning more than one language opens a lot of professional opportunities to workers. Individuals can easily work from anywhere without language barrier issues.
3. Easy to learn other languages: Learning two languages at schools makes it easy to learn other languages fluently. This encourages brain growth and increases the student’s concentration.
4. Offer multi-personality benefits: Learning to speak multiple languages increases students’ ability to process new sounds, increase their self-esteem as well as reduce anxiety and other personality disorders.
5. Boost student’s wisdom: Bilingual education leads to the development of personal experiences as well as encourages first-hand exposure to new cultures. It leads to the improvement of one’s wisdom and decision-making ability.
6. Students can use it as an extra-curricular activity: Many schools in the US that are offering bilingual education give students the chance to practice new things and new cultures in class. This opens the door for new ideas and focus. By learning two languages, the student will learn new things every day and this will form a cluster of part-time or extra-curricular activities. With bilingual education, there is always a new thing to learn and explore and the new things may become part of their daily routine.
7. Bilingual education contributes to self-esteem and personal development: Learning a new language comes with lots of benefits. Research result shows that people who can speak more than one language are very confident and they display high self-esteem. Students that learn new languages can process new sounds with ease. Kids who experience bi-lingual education are less likely to experience anxiety and personality disorders. They don’t feel lonely compared to kids who are trained with a single language.
8. Bilingual education encourages peaceful coexistence: By knowing how to communicate in a new language, the students will be able to interact with foreigners. They will know more about foreigners. This goes a long way in breeding peaceful existence and harmony in society.
9. There is fun in learning a new language: Bilingual education eliminates boredom and adds more fun to learning. With bilingual education, the students will be looking up to learning something new every day. Exploring new things, new words, cultures, and the meaning of words add more fun to learning.
10. It builds interpersonal skills and teamwork: With bilingual education, there is always a new thing to learn. The students are likely to interact with each other as well as foreigners when trying to solve their school tasks. With this, their interpersonal skills will be boosted. More so, they will learn how to work as part of a team.
Cons:
1. Inconsistent learning: Some schools don’t offer bilingual educations and others stop teaching in high school. This creates learning inconsistency since students won’t be able to continue learning the second language.
2. Expensive: Learning a foreign language is very expensive and most of the schools don’t offer it unless it is a mandated course.
3. Prevents involvement in local culture: Learning a foreign language offer adds several advantages to students and isolation disadvantages. Although students will be exposed to a wide culture, it creates a gap in the local culture because they would love to interact more with people from other cultures.
4. Lack of qualified teachers: Bilingual education requires highly qualified and fluent teachers. With the modern bilingual teaching requirements, many teachers do not meet those requirements in order to teach effectively.
5. Reduces focus on a career: As students are obliged to learn the second language, their time to develop the essential skills is limited. They will have less time to spend on learning specialized skills.
6. It can cause stigma: Bilingual education has the tendency of instigating stigmatization: The possibilities of bilingual language are mostly used in immigration and it has some negative effects. Some foreigners may consider learning a new language as a systematic way of opening their culture to others. Friction might set in between the foreigners and the immigrants. Due to this, some students may isolate their selves from their colleagues.
7. Waste of time and energy: Why waste time teaching a language that does not interest the learners? The students may see no reason for learning two languages. As such, all efforts put into teaching them might become futile and an utter waste of time. They may even miss classes due to a lack of passion for the language.
8. It can lead to poor grades: A child who is struggling to have a grip of the second language may face serious academic challenges. The frustration that comes with it can cause depression and this will reflect in their grades.
9. It may put the natives in a bad light: Bilingual education may reveal the negative side of the community. If the language has a bad origin, then the bad picture may be opened to both the foreigners and the locals. This may not augur well, as the foreigners may feel offended.
10. Bilingual Education is arduous: For children, learning two languages is quite complicating. They face uphill tasks in having a grip on the various concepts of the language in each coursework. In most schools, the procedure is to teach one language for half part of the class period and the second language for the remaining period of the class. Imagine a child who is struggling to understand division and at the same time is struggling with a new language. This can be very detrimental to learning.
On the whole, learning two languages is good but it is knitted with some negatives. It would be best if you consider the two sides of the coin before deciding whether to enroll your child in a bilingual school.
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