Parents’ anxiety is understandable as studies on bilingualism often produce mixed results. Some studies have demonstrated positive effects of bilingualism, but many others have shown just the opposite.  With these contradictory research findings, researchers are at odds on whether bilingualism is an advantage or disadvantage.  

Studies proving the harmful effects are often overstated that bilingualism results in academic retardation, inferior intelligence and lower IQ. Bilingual children are seen as socially maladjusted as compared with monolingual children. They tend to suffer from linguistic retardation or mental confusion.

More recent studies, however, have attempted to debunk the studies showing negative effects of bilingualism, suggesting that the above studies are methodologically flawed, and therefore yield invalid conclusions. J.F. Hammers and M.H.A. Blanc (2000) in their book Bilinguality and Bilingualism have managed to document numerous studies showing that bilingualism results in a greater ability in reconstructing perceptual situations and a greater sensitivity to semantic relations between words, produces superior results on verbal and non-verbal intelligence, better performance in rule-discovery tasks, and a greater degree of divergent thinking.

It is fair to say here that the appeal of international schools compared to regular schools is that the former offers a bilingual program for children, an educational program that is not available in the latter.

Our country, like other countries such as China, Japan and Korean, is suffering from what Steve Krashen, a renowned American education specialist, dubs “English Fever” – a burning desire to acquire English at very young age. It is thus understandable why many schools are in competition to run bilingual programs for young language learners.    

In my view, it is not the bilingual program per se that causes damaging cognitive effects to learning, as has been demonstrated by the previously mentioned studies, but rather the teaching method used to assist learners in becoming bilingual speakers.

The problem here is that when assisting learners during their journey to become competent bilingual speakers, teachers often set too high a standard that they lose sight of the fact that learners’ cognitive growth is still developing.

From my own observation, I’ve seen that teachers are ambitious in their expectation, requiring learners to read heavy reading materials in English, to forbid the use of the learners’ native language, and to memorize grammar rules and vocabulary items.  The use of the learners’ first language is often forbidden by teachers because it has been commonly assumed that the first language inhibits the acquisition of the second language.

Worse still, teachers seem to be fond of assigning tasks in English, a task that the learners too often cannot perform in their native language.

Because it is the methodology that is to blame for producing a likely damaging students’ cognitive development, the solution then is to help teachers understand the principles of language acquisition.

It has been evident that presenting them with knowledge of language acquisition is one effective solution in that it can help justify methodology. Armed with this knowledge, teachers will reap a valuable benefit of how language is effectively acquired by second language learners. Most importantly, they will be aware that the goal of all education including bilingual education is, to quote Steve Krashen, “not to produce masters but to allow [students]… to continue to grow as [independent language acquirers].

The writer teaches English to young children, and can be reached at evariestj@yahoo.com.

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