The Bilingual Education

Bilingual education is becoming a trend nowadays. According to Wikipedia, “Bilingual education involves teaching academic content in two languages, in a native and secondary language with varying amounts of each language used in accordance with the program model.” In other words, bilingual education is a method that is used by schools to make the students speak their secondary language as fluently as their native language. In Indonesia, for example, the schools compete to use bilingual education. The students are expected to be able to speak English as well as Indonesian. Then, the problem that should be encountered by the schools is whether they have already had enough preparations to apply bilingual education in their school. In my opinion, at least there are three problems which should be solved if the schools want to have good preparations to apply bilingual education. They are financial preparation, competent teachers, and supporting environment.

First, financial preparation is important to be considered. A school that wants to apply bilingual education should provide equipped facilities and technology to support the student studying the lesson in two languages. As stated in http://www.scribd.com, “One of the causes of this is the low quality of the schools’ graduates in the mastery of science and technology. It is due to limited knowledge on the English written learning sources. Besides, they cannot optimize the technology based learning sources to support their learning process”. Take the book, as an example. Obviously, to facilitate the students in the learning process, the school should have prepared bilingual books. As we know, the bilingual book is more expensive than the book which is written in Indonesian. For example, for the books which are published by the international publishers, we have to pay around Rp, 300,000 to get it while we can get the local books with Rp, 70,000. That is why the school should prepare more money to get those books. The next problem of the financial preparation is that not all of the schools in Indonesia have enough budgets to provide the bilingual books. There are still so many schools that have financial problems. Even, it is difficult for them to provide appropriate books for their students. Moreover, they should buy the bilingual one. Therefore, until now, majority of the schools in Indonesia still have not been ready yet to apply bilingual education since they still have problems with the financial.

The next problem is the minimum of competent teachers. Loretta Nannini said in http://www.ambrit-rome.com, “To facilitate learning, teachers need to "accommodate students' background knowledge and skills" (Danielson, 1996, p. 41).” It is ineffectual if a school has provided equipped facilities but the student is not accompanied by the skillful teacher. Since the teacher is related directly with the students, they have to have ability in English. Moreover, because the textbook is majority written in English, the teachers have to understand what the book is about so that they can deliver it to the students correctly. In Indonesia, indeed, so many teachers do not have a good proficiency in English yet. In SDN 2 Pecalukan-Pasuruan, for example, the teacher who has ability in English is only the English teacher, whereas, bilingual education is applied for most of the subjects. Thus, they should be given a kind of training to improve their English skills.

The last, supporting environment is important to be held. Even though in class the students have to be able to speak in two languages, it will not be effective if the environment does not support them too. Therefore, the school should be able to provide the natural English learning community for the student. It is obviously not enough if the students are only given English materials in the class but the hope is that the students can improve knowledge out of the class. For example, the school obligates all of the members of the school to totally use English to communicate in certain days so that the students can practice using English in their daily conversation. In short, Bilingual education schools can fulfill the good quality of learning English if the bilingual community is upheld.

Based on my explanation above, we can conclude that it is important for the school to be aware of financial preparation, competent teachers, and supporting environment, before they decide to make their schools become the bilingual education schools. It is can be started from the readiness of the school to prepare themselves in every single member of the schools, for example, the teachers, the students, the facilities, the technology, and so on. Thus, it is better for the school to get prepared of those problems above so that their goal to be an effective bilingual education school can be realized. Besides that, in terms of education, Indonesia can be able to compete with other countries.

Written by

Asizah