What Are The Impacts Of Bilingual Education Programs On EFL Learners

Impacts of bilingual education programs on EFL learners in Thailand

The majority of people in the world use more than one language in the course of their daily lives, and it is estimated that most children today grow up with exposure to two or more languages. Due to many reasons, in the twenty-first century, knowing only one language is not enough for learners; additionally, bilingual education has been used as a common educational method all over the world; for instance, English is mainly used as a language for working, communication and conferences in European countries even though there are many official and working languages recognized by the European Union. Similarly, there have been an increasing number of English-medium programs

According to Jantrasakul (2014), there are two main reasons of bilingual education having been used as a common educational method all over the world, especially in Asian countries like Thailand: ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) has encouraged the Thai government to enhance English-mediated programs in the national education system for the purpose of motivating English language skills of non-native English speaking (NNS) students in Thailand and Thai parents play a role for their children to choose English-mediated programs in order to ensure getting better quality education, socialization skills with people from different cultural backgrounds and career paths. Thailand has enhanced the use of considerable English-mediated programs in the national higher education system due to globalization, telecommunication, and technology advancement ( Hengsadeekul, Koul, & Kaewkuekool, 2014; Jantrasakul, 2014). Integrating English into the instructions of the courses can help EFL learners to

According to the study done by Cahnmann & Varghese (2005) , English-mediated programs can offer many job opportunities for learners because there has been increasing demand for bilingual job hunters in the twenty-first century and a bilingual tends to possess a higher level of self-esteem and confidence than a monolingual. Halle et al. (2014) presents that the bilingual education system can help EFL learners to improve their emotional intelligence (EI) which is one of the most important skills in twenty first century workplace through improving social and emotional developments: self-regulation, and social competence. Furthermore, bilingual learners’ possession of better understanding and interacting skills through learning more than one language as well as cultures at the same time help them deal with the differences and solving problems appropriately because they have greater inhibitory control than monolingual learners, tend to be sophisticated thinkers, have more flexible thinking, and approach conflicts from different perspectives (Halle et al., 2014). The research paper based on the collection of the data from the socio-economic benefits of bilingual education from two ethnographic studies of bilingual teachers and their students in the United States shows that bilingual schooling in which English language teaching is applied prepares learners to be able