THE ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF
A BILINGUAL EDUCATION IN SCHOOLS
Nowadays, most of our students are used to studying at
schools where a bilingual education is offered. But is it totally
effective to spend more hours on studying a second
language instead of gaining knowledge about our mother
tongue?
On the one hand, I think that we can find lots of pros,
because the sooner a child starts to study a second
language, for instance English, the better results he/she may
get in the future.
Apart from this, when a student begins to learn two
languages at the same time, the ear becomes more used to
them and as a result, the pronunciation, vocabulary and
intonation improve a lot.
Moreover, when somebody learns two languages at the
same time there are fewer problems in understanding
grammatical structures, word order, etc., so that, in the
future perhaps teachers will not have to spend so much time
explaining grammar.
On the other hand, I believe that there are some cons too,
since most bilingual schools usually offer more hours to
study this second language than to teach the mother tongue.
In my opinion, I feel that it is also pretty important to get a
complete knowledge about the language which is spoken in
your country because sometimes our students do not learn
their own language in an appropriate way or they do not pay
enough attention to the importance of learning Spanish as
well as English.
Learning both languages is very useful, but we should allow
as many hours to study our mother tongue because teachers
often find students who make a lot of grammar mistakes
since they spend less time on learning Spanish, or if not,
they lose study time for important subjects such as Maths,
Science or Art.
From my point of view, I think that at present it is lucky we
have so many schools in which our children have the
opportunity to study two languages but we should not
neglect one for the other as they are equally important.
To sum up, learning more than one language in schools is
very useful and the perfect system would involve students
spending the same number of hours on each language.
Sonia Doñores Berlinches