Bilingual Education

Bilingual Education is a way of teaching academic students in two languages. It means that in the class, the lesson presented in two language, in English and native language. As example: teaching Economic in English and Bahasa Indonesia. Bilingual Education is intended to help students keep up with the others, especially they who speak English as native language. Just like another method of teaching English, Bilingual Education has several advantages and disadvantages. We need to know this kind of advantages and disadvantages. Then decide whether it can be used or not for teaching today.

            The most important thing about Bilingual Education advantages is because this method of teaching improves students’ ability not only in the English lesson, but also by the time they learn another lesson. As example, when they have discussion or presentation about the lesson, they can speak English to communicate with others. Their interaction in class can improve their English ability. This event not only used to improve their ability, but also to evaluate their English that has been learnt till now. This kind of evaluation can be done by getting a correction from the audiences, about materials that they have discussed and presented. The correction is also given in other aspects, like the way they present their assignment and whether the audiences can get the idea easily or not. If the audiences cannot get the idea easily it means that the way they explain in English, need more exercises.

            Beside the advantages that have been explained above, Bilingual Education can give disadvantages to the class. First of all, this will be misunderstanding when there are some students who hard to understand what the teacher said. We know that in study, we need to know the idea of the materials. We cannot get the idea of the materials if we do not know English well, or the teacher does not speak English clear enough. Next, this will be really hard when the core subject of study like Mathematic and Chemistry, are presented in English. We need to give more attention about English for Science. And for the last one, sometimes it does not effective when the school that use Bilingual Education gives additional time out of the school time and separates the class into regular class and bilingual class. This happened in a Senior High School at Blitar, and it makes the students in bilingual class hard to socialize with others and sometimes they are depressed because of having less time to have fun like students in a regular class.

            In summary, Bilingual Education have advantages and disadvantages in improving English ability, keeping up with others in Global Era, allocation of the time in study, and diversification in school. This advantage must be kept during study and this disadvantage must be resolved. As recommendations for head master and teachers in every school, especially they who work in school with international standard, we need to use Bilingual Education not only in the certain class, but also in every class without additional time and maintains which lesson that can use Bilingual Education so that the students get easier to understand the lessons and English lesson intensively given in English class.

Moehamat Hendrik S.