Educating Bilingual Learners in School

Educating Bilingual learners in school

Defining Bilingual Education

The Models of Bilingual Education

Benefits and challenges of bilingual education

Strategies and Methods of Teaching Bilingual Learners

Masoona Noori Mahroosa Noori

Bilingual Education The term "bilingual education" describes teaching academic content in two languages, a student's native language, and a second language. Different amounts of each language are used depending on the model's end purpose. (Grant & Gottardo, 2008)

The Models of Bilingual Education In the literature on bilingualism, three basic models of bilingual education are recognized:

• Transitional model
• Maintenance model and
• Enrichment model

each of them describing different program goals with respect to educational contexts, relationships of majority and minority language speakers, and the sequencing of the languages as media of instruction within the program.

The main benefits of bilingual education are:

• Increasing cognitive development
• Better academic achievement
• Improving the ability to memory
• Resistance to dementia
• Increasing the economic opportunities
• Cross-cultural appreciation
• Improving the executive function of the brain. (Angela, 2022)

The main challenges of bilingual education:

• Over Time, the programs are inconsistent
• Target language content can cause learning challenges
• Lack of qualified and trained teachers and staff
• Lack of administration support
• Mixing languages
• Preference for one language over the other. (Fajkus, 2020)

Strategies and Methods of Teaching Bilingual Learners A teacher can’t speak in more than one language at once, so despite the best efforts to slow down, repeat instructions, or demonstrate the task at hand, the teacher frequently encounters blank looks from students or, worse, students who dropped out as soon as the teacher started speaking in their second language. Teaching students to read and write in two languages while covering academic material is getting more challenging for teachers in dual-language classrooms. So, some strategies can be useful to apply in educating bilingual students.