There are conflicting viewpoints about bilingual education. Some scholars and teachers believe that it helps the student develop in both languages, while others think that it does not benefit the student’s language development. The internet has a large amount of educator websites and blogs that spew a ton of differing information out there. I believe, that as of now, bilingual education is not truly benefitting students’ language development in both languages. I encourage anyone to perform their own research and read what is being said about this topic, but also evaluate those sources critically.
I came to my own conclusion about bilingual education by reading various online resources. As you read on, you will see how some authors differ in credibility than others and how that helped me in making my own decision about bilingual education. To start, Dr. Nelson Flores proposes “The most effective English language learning programs, Flores said, are dual language bilingual education programs” (How Monolingual Teachers Can Support Bilingual Students). He is an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania, which makes him qualified to discuss these topics, but he does not use any data from scholarly research to back his claim. He does not provide the readers any sort of articles or textbooks that he learned from. There are also no test scores provided to show that bilingual students are doing better with their language development in a bilingual setting.
While Dr. Flores is advocating for bilingual education with no research to back it up, Patricia Gandara and Frances Contreras explain why a bilingual education is not actually beneficial for students. Gandara and Contreras use research to support their claim that:
Although well-implemented bilingual programs can claim a "moderate" advantage over English-immersion instruction, no language intervention has erased the gap between English speakers and English learners, or between native-English white children and Latinos (Bilingual Education: The Failed Experiment)
Gandara and Contreras use a multitude of scholarly sources throughout their article on ¡Colorín Colorado!. They explain historical background and evaluate research for their readers. In doing so, Gandara and Contreras provide a substantial counterargument to anyone that believes bilingual education is helpful to bilingual students’ language abilities.
In my own research this semester in Linguistics, I wrote about bilingual students and teacher influence. One section of my paper included research about a code-switching (alternating between two or more languages) classroom. In this article titled "Teacher's Code-Switching and Bilingual Children's Heritage Language Learning and Cognitive Switching Flexibility",the preschool classes that participated in the study included teachers that would teach English for part of the day and a Singapore national language for the other part of the day. Ultimately, He Sun, Nurul Yussof, Poorani Vijayakumar, Gabrielle Lai and Beth Ann O’Brien provided findings that the code-switching did not provide the students with any vocabulary development in their home language. The main purpose of bilingual education is to increase ability in both languages simultaneously; Sun and his colleague’s scholarly reviewed study proved that this setting was not increasing ability.
I do not think providing bilingual education to students is beneficial for their language development. The research demonstrates that the students are not increasing language ability from these types of settings any more than they would in a general monolingual setting with some supports. By understanding that bilingual classrooms are not increasing students’ language development, then teachers and linguistic scholars may be able to come together to find different ways that will make a positive impact on the bilingual students’ linguistic development.
