Learning Strategies In Bilingual Education

There are multiple approaches when looking at the way immigrant children or children from immigrant families should be taught. The most common types of bilingual programs analyzed are Paired Bilingual, Transitional Bilingual Education (TBE), Dual Language (DL)/ Two-Way Bilingual Immersion and English-only Immersion. In the Paired Bilingual program children learn in their native language and English. Researchers like Baker, Park, Baker, Basaraba, Kame’enui, and Beck (2012) compared PBE and an English-only program on ELs. It was believed that if the proficiency skills for Spanish were high then the students comprehension skills in English would be high too.

Linguists and researchers as Purcell, Lee, Biffin, Baker distinguish other division of bilingualism and bilingual education. The basic division of bilingualism into compound, coordinate, balanced and dominant, has been already mentioned however there are some other criteria defining the division of bilingualism. Baker (2001) introduced several types of bilingual education programmes that are spread worldwide. Nowadays a lot of schools follow the curriculum based on the bilingual programmes invented by Baker. These programmes include the ways of learning foreign languages, the programmes reinforcing the target language or the programmes retaining the mother tongue at the first place and developing the target

It states that equivalence is achieved through the learner being exposed to reinforcements of language and a verbal community. Different researchers have come up with different ways to discriminate their procedures therefore the results vary. One such arbitrarily example is when a child learns to name objects and events in their world they are relational responding this according to behaviorist is a stimulus that can be link to many stimuli (Barnes-Holmes , Barnes-Holmes , Smeets , Cullinan, & Leader , 2004). It is important to note that equivalence stimuli is an empirical occurrence and RFT is the theory of how that occurrence came about; therefore they are different in many ways but can work together to derive results that can help researchers learn about the

Before talking about the arguments for and against the bilingual education, it is essential to define this notion. Bilingual education is often mixed with bilingualism, but those notions are slightly different. The bilingualism characterizes someone who “has the minimum ability to complete fluency in more than one language” (Hornby, 1977), whereas the bilingual education is “the use of two languages as a media of instruction for a child or a group of children in part or all of the school curriculum” (Cohen, 1975). Thus, bilingual education is taught mainly through school, unlike bilingualism which can be acquired thanks to two parents who gives two different native languages to their child. Arguments in favor of bilingual education.

For example, bilingual helps to assimilate native and migratory minorities, which is a means of language planning. At other times, bilingual education is a core in language revitalization & retention. The perspective of language planners is extremely and important and necessary means of language maintenance, revitalization, and overturning language skills.

Minorities face difficult stressors and barriers in America. I encountered many issues at home because my parents expected me to know both English and Hmong fluently. While at school, my teachers expected my English to be as proficient as my Native English speaking classmates. During my high school years, I sensed that my teachers didn’t understand to the fact that bilingual students have a harder time with their English language and no matter how much we learn the English language we will never speak or write it entirely without grammars like the Native English. In the article called, Minority students, White teachers: does it matter?

To understand what is LAD, we need to think deeper to a child’s experiences in learning language. Saffran, R. J. et al. (1996) states that, “Before infants can begin to map words onto objects in the world, they must determine which sound sequences are words. To do so, infants must uncover at least some of the units that belong to their native language from a largely continuous stream of sounds in which words are seldom surrounded by pauses. Despite the difficulty of this reverse-engineering problem, infants successfully segment words from fluent speech from seven months of age”.

There are two type of families. There is one family that speak only English and the other one that speak their home language and English in their household. Those type of families that speak two or more languages in their household are mostly immigrants that move to the United States. Their child or children will grow up speaking perfect English while their parents will speak poor English. In Amy Tan “Mother Tongue”, she talks about how without proper English it is sometimes difficult to get through daily life.

If students begin their bilingual education as early as kindergarten, they are more likely to successfully acquire a second language. Children are like sponges and soak up information easily. Research conducted by Dr. Patricia Kuhl at the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington shows that by 8-12 months, if babies are exposed to a second language, they retain the ability to distinguish those foreign sounds. Moreover, through the age of 7 or 8, children are able to learn to speak a second language with fluent grammar and without an accent. After this critical period, the ability to master a

2.0 INTRODUCTION Language development happens both inside the classroom (as part of a formal establishment, school or institute) and outside it. The classroom is generally considered a formal setting, and most other environments informal, with respect to language learning. “In environments where informal language development is adequate, it is possible to regard the formal classroom as supplemental, complementary, facilitating and consolidating”(Van Lier, 1988: 20). For second-language development in such environments the informal settings can be regarded as primary and the formal classroom as ancillary. The L2 lesson then becomes a language arts lesson, focusing on special language skills and cognitive/academic growth, much in the same way