Bilingual teaching
Bilingual teachingStructurally ineffective bilingual education for language minority students is a controversial concept that invokes heated arguments among those people in and associated with many of the nation's educational systems. Bilingual education, in most cases, is the instruction of a student's core classes, such as history, math, and science, in his or her native language and the instruction of a supplementary English as a Second Language course. For decades, much of the debate surrounding this type of bilingual instruction in classrooms with language minority students has focused on whether or not the students will learn English better by being completely immersed in English or by being initially instructed in their native language. Many English-only advocates and other opponents of bilingual education have passionately discredited its effectiveness and tend to argue that immersion quickens second language acquisition by stressing only the new language. On the other hand, proponents of bilingual education claim that a gradual transition to English via native language instruction assures student success because the students will be able to use their previously acquired knowledge to help them learn the English language. However, despite the well-intended concerns of the public and academic community, the controversy that swirls around second language acquisition does not focus on some of the aspects of bilingual education that should be improved in order to make the programs more effective.
Although ample evidence favors bilingual education as a means to help students grow academically, structural flaws such as bilingual education programs that allow children to suffer too long in ineffective or unsuitable programs and a lack of bilingually qualified teachers prevent many programs from accomplishing the most that they can accomplish. In order to address these issues, educators should pursue a focused debate that concentrates on how the students who are acquiring English will best acquire the skills and literacy that will benefit them in school and out of school instead of arguing whether bilingual education is detrimental or beneficial to language minority students. Bilingual education programs are most effective when the properly trained bilingual teachers are available to instruct the language minority students.
In order to provide students with the most effective and most comprehensible methods of instruction, teachers need to be trained in such areas as combining English as a second language instruction with content area instruction. They need to be able to transform contemporary research on literacy and language acquisition into realistic instructional strategies. Finally, they need to be able to encourage students to think and reason and to use English to express their ideas. A combination of such abilities would make bilingual education instructors more productive in the classroom.
Unfortunately, however, some of the bilingual instructors are not sufficiently qualified for the job. The problem is especially severe in non-Spanish languages. Since the major minority population in the United States speaks Spanish, speakers of others languages are in smaller percentage in some schools....
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