Nowadays, the majority of countries in the world join in cooperating each other to fund their life. It needs more qualified human recourses that are capable in communicating with other countries civilization. Obviously, they need to be educated from childhood. The best way to raise a bilingual child is to expose them to both languages at the same time. Therefore, bilingual education is published to the society. Bilingual education is the practice of teaching non-English speaking students core subjects in their native language as they learn English. Developed in the 1970's, such programs were intended to help children keep up with their peers in subjects such as math, science and social studies while they studied English (www.proenglish.org/). Nevertheless, the great number of bilingual school in Indonesia is provided for the huge enthusiasts itself. It is not balanced with the quality of the elements which support the bilingual education. This means that bilingual education has been indicated to be ineffective. There are several reasons why bilingual education is impressed that way, three of which are based on: the capability of the teacher, the psychological burdens of the students and the future destiny of the student also.
The first reason is that the capability of the teacher who teaches in bilingual school is hesitated. The teacher is one of the important elements in the education. They set the students’ background knowledge as the facilitator and the conductor of the learning process. This condition should be run as well as the aim by providing qualified teacher. However, in the bilingual education especially in Indonesia, the teachers who are capable of teaching by English language are limited. Therefore, the only choice is to employ native speaker to be a teacher. As I find in some sources, many of them are not graduated yet from a college. For instance, the history teacher in one of the bilingual schools is only graduated from senior high school. He was only a disc-jockey when he was in US. This means that the qualification in hiring the bilingual education teacher is low.
Not only that, bilingual education affects the psychological burdens of the students. As we may think, studying with the foreign language is not as easy as those who do not have a good proficiency in English. In addition, this condition forces the student to understand what the teacher says at the first time before they finally comprehend with the subject of study. For the evidence, one of the students in bilingual school says that he only catches a few words and the rest is his teacher’s grumble speech. It can be summarized that they are despair with such a conditions.
Afterwards, the future destiny of the bilingual school students is unclear yet. When they do not continue their study to abroad, this means that they have the same chance with other regular freshmen. They have to compete in the university entrance test. For instance, while the students of bilingual education have 70% of English competence, is given economic test in English. He/she can only comprehend 70% of the test. It is different from those who study economic by mother language. At least he/she can comprehend 98% of economic knowledge. On the other words, studying in bilingual school cannot guarantee whether he/she passes university entrance test or not.
In sum up, bilingual education does not achieve good result for the society as they think before. It considers the capability of the teacher which is still low. It also enables the students to have under-pressured condition. Even, the future destiny of the students is still being doubted to reach success easily. Therefore, I can recommend you to be selective in choosing education for your children based on its weaknesses.
Sources:
Written by
Orista Vella A
109221426101
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