Bilingual Schooling

Well....
Today I managed to have an argument (heated discussion) with an ESL 'expert' who believes that two way education is pointless... grrr....

Basically she believes that children would learn English better (speak it more fluently) if they only learnt through English from the beginning. When I pointed out that ALL of the research has found that children who learn through their first language (and start learning the dominate language) and eventually switch over and learn through the dominate language become more fluent in the dominate language (than children who learn through submersion in the dominate language) and develop concepts at a deeper level.

Also!! School is not there to just teach language, school is about teaching concepts. We must look at the research that has found that children who go to a bilingual (two-way) school develop deeper concepts in both languages than children who learn the dominate language through submersion.

By allowing children to learn concepts that are age appropriate when they start schooling by providing the instruction in their first language and provide tuition in the dominate language so that the children do not have to pause their conceptual development while they develop competency to discuss/investigate concepts through the dominate language...

Remember children start learning the day that they are born and they start labelling concepts through their first language. By providing links to these concepts their first language label and the second language label, this allows children to utilise their pre-existing knowledge, and not have to develop a whole new concept base

For example we all have an idea of what grass is.. and a whole list of concepts attached to this label (green, grows on the ground, needs to be mowed etc etc) yet if someone asked us Nhakul Mulmul? (What is mulmul?) Most people would be lost. Even if you had learnt (early on in our language development) that Nha is 'what' and Kul is a suffix that in this case means 'for'
With children who learn the dominate language through submersion they may have no idea what the person means by Mulmul..

Hmm perhaphs not the best example of it as you could show a photo... or go outside.. but what about weather? or time? or family connections? or mathematical concepts and ideas? over, under, through etc etc etc

-takes a deep breath-

Okay that's my rant :P if you have any questions please feel free to e-mail me.. as this happens to be my pet subject at the moment.

Any how the long and the short of it is.. I told the lady that she should do some readings on it and she told me in a haughty voice... "I have masters in Applied Linguistics" I reframed from telling here that since she didn't know anything about language aquistion that it is not worth the paper that it is written on..." -laughs-

but i did print off readings and highlight the relevant parts and give them to her for reading. :P

Take Care
Grace