‘Bilingual education’ generally signifies education where two distinct languages are used for general teaching. Its programs aim at easing the non-English or native speaker into the English academic environment by teaching content classes in the native language (Freeman, 1996). Our government wants to apply this system in this country to improve the ability of the students. The government thinks that bilingual education can help us to compete with other country, because it will more practice using English language than schools using monolingual language. But it cannot apply maximum. Moreover, bilingual education is often misunderstood and complicated. There are three reasons why bilingual education is like that: school preparation, lack of native speakers and public mindset.
The first reason is that the school does not prepare for this program. Many schools want to apply this program for their school, but their facility is not completed with a request. In addition, the school does not organize for this program. We can take an example like an infrastructure in the school is not able to applying bilingual education program, such as the language laboratory. Sometimes, the laboratory is provided, but the equipment does not work maximum. Thus, it needs repairing to make it better and the students can use the equipment.
Not only that, most of the schools do not have any native speaking teachers. It is really poor qualified one, because the schools which apply bilingual education should have native speaker. The native speaker can help the teacher to teach English. Then the native speaker should be extending and improving the students not, potentially, perplexing and confusing them. Just as students of English recognize the need for grammar to guide language usage, they should also recognize that there may be certain rules or ways to follow in pronunciation that are important. So, it is important to schools has a native speaker if they want apply bilingual education in their school.
The last reason is the public is not familiar with this type of education. Citizens do not know about bilingual education and little is known about what bilingual education is, what its goals are, how it can be implemented and how effective and successful it is. Worse still, even its practitioners and professional organizations are not really sure about the concept of bilingual education. They only know education with their mother tongue. It is hard to introduce to them about bilingual language. It is one of the factors that make bilingual education cannot apply in this country.
Bilingual education actually offers more than these mentioned above. It is true that our country is not ready to apply this program. We do not have enough preparation for this program, like the teacher, the facility and the citizens. So, the government should give attention to this problem. There are important for the government gives subsidy to schools which apply bilingual education program. Then, they can build the infrastructure in their schools or repair their infrastructure to make it better. Beside that, the teachers must be ready to teach their student with bilingual language. Then, the citizens (especially the parents) must know bilingual education itself. It will help process study. Bilingual education can be successful, if all of the parts on bilingual education have awareness to make bilingual education better for the next generation.
Sources:
Written by
Sifa Fauziah Permatasari
209221423194
No comments:
Post a Comment