Sunday 12 December 2010

Is Bilingual Education Good?

Bilingual education is a program where the education process is held in two languages. In our country, it is held in Indonesian as the native language and English as the additional language. The aim is to teach academic subjects to students in their native language, while slowly and simultaneously adding English, so they are accustomed to using this international language in their daily activities. Some people think that bilingual education is good, but have you ever thought about the negative side of this program? There are several negative sides of this program, but this time I will just show you three of them.
To begin with, I am going to discuss about the ineffectiveness of this program. Students in bilingual classes are forced to learn English because that is the only way to understand the lessons which are mostly taught in English. This condition makes them feel that learning English is a must and it makes their English better. But there is a quite different story for students who are not good in English. They feel that every class in bilingual class is a disaster. Do you know the reason? Yes you are right, they cannot understand the lesson at all because they cannot understand the teacher’s explanations. It makes them more confused because they have to think twice, first about the English and then the lessons. That is ineffective.
Those are about the ineffectiveness of this program. Let us move to the next point. It is about the economic side. Besides smart, money is also needed if we want to attend a bilingual school. As we know, bilingual education can only be found in international schools (RSBI) which normally cost a lot of money. As I know, the amount of money that we have to pay for this kind of school is more expensive than a college. Nowadays, the school fee that has to be paid for international elementary schools is almost 250.000 rupiahs/month which is too expensive for poor family with low income about 700.000 rupiahs/month. That reason makes poor students unable to go to an international school to get this kind of education although they are good in English and other subjects. That is not fair since only rich students can get this kind of education so there will be a social gap between the rich and the poor students.
Let us go ahead to the next destination of our discussion. In this part we are going to discuss about the unavailability of teachers and the quality of the teacher itself. Bilingual education requires a number of good teachers who are proficient in both native and additional language, in this case are Indonesian and English. As we know, the number of teachers in our country who are proficient in English is limited.Usually, there are only about four till five teachers who are good in those two languages in a school. There is a wide gap between the demand and the supply for teachers who are both confident and capable of handing the bilingual classes. Even in a RSBI school, there are some teachers who are not too good in English force themselves to teach there. They teach using English without paying attention to their English whether it is right or not. For result, their students will be the victim. The student will get nothing and their English become worst.
What people think about bilingual education is not always true because they just think the positive one. From the explanation above we can conclude that bilingual education has some negative side. First, this program is not effective for students who are not too good in English because they will miss the teacher’s explanation. Second, there will be a social gap between the rich and the poor students. Third, the unavailability and the quality of the teachers problem will affect the quality of the students. What I can suggest you is that you should think twice if you want to send your children in a bilingual school, because some of them are not as good as you think. 

Sources:  
http://buzzle.com

Written by
Trisna Aprilia
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