Bilingual Education: Benefits and Challenges

The Benefits of Bilingual Education

Growing up in a bilingual environment and receiving a bilingual education does not just promote the child’s own development; it also brings great advantages to the whole family and the wider community.

For children, being able to comfortably handle more than one language offers three key benefits:

• Better academic performance: this is because bilingual children tend to have greater concentration and stronger skills in analysis and multitasking.

• A stronger sense of self-worth, identity, and belonging: this includes pride in the cultural heritage and language (or dialect) of their community, the confidence to communicate with extended family members, and the ability to appreciate art, music, film, or literature presented in more than one language.

• Richer career opportunities later in life.

For families, raising children bilingually and maintaining their mother tongue can:

• Improve communication between family members.

• Help children and other family members better integrate into and understand their own culture.

• Strengthen the family’s overall cultural identity and sense of belonging.

For the larger community (or collective) that the family belongs to, when children master more than two languages, it means that:

• Every member of the community can better understand different languages and cultures.

• In the future, children can more easily travel or work in culturally diverse countries.

• Children are able to understand and appreciate different cultures.

Possible Challenges of Bilingual Education

It’s true that raising a child bilingually does come with challenges. Sometimes parents have to put in extra effort, and bilingual education requires long-term persistence.

If you want your child to grow up in a bilingual environment, you will need to:

• Make sure your child has plenty of opportunities to hear and use the second language.

• Give your child plenty of encouragement and support.

• Seek support and help for yourself—for example, by connecting with friends or other families who are also raising bilingual children.

• Talk with your child’s teachers and get their support.

• Stick with the language choices you made at the start (don’t keep switching).

• Keep both yourself and your child motivated, so that he or she is willing and happy to speak their first language.

• Pay attention to situations or moments when your child actually “needs” to use their first language.

• Help your child cope with peer pressure to “speak only English.”

If sometimes you feel that overcoming these challenges is incredibly tough, just take a moment to think about the rewards of bilingual education—especially the fact that it can help build a stronger family bond between you and your child.

Bilingual Education: Frequently Asked Questions

1. Can children understand the differences between languages?
Children are able to understand the differences between languages from a very young age, and they can learn two or even more languages at the same time. For example, they quickly realise that they need to speak German with Grandma but English with their teacher.

2. How does bilingual education affect a child’s learning of English?
In fact, knowing and having a solid grasp of their mother tongue helps children learn the language used by the wider society (such as English in Australia). Bilingual children who have a strong foundation in their home language actually have an advantage over those who don’t learn their mother tongue at home—they can pick up the majority language more easily and tend to perform better at school.

3. How does bilingual education affect a child’s literacy development?
Even if bilingual children are exposed to two different written languages (for example, Spanish and English), or even two entirely different writing systems (for example, Chinese and English), they can still reach very high levels of literacy in English. In fact, they may develop a clearer understanding of the connections between sounds and written words than their monolingual English-speaking peers.

4. Does bilingual education affect a child’s language development?
Bilingual children do not lag behind monolingual children in the speed of their language development. Every child learns to speak at their own pace and time, but that variation is not due to whether they are learning more than one language at once.