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bliged by pressure to use English in the upcoming ASEAN Economic Community next year, Research, Technology and Higher Education Minister Muhammad Nasir has recently said that the ministry was preparing a bilingual curriculum, in Bahasa Indonesia and English, for use in universities nationwide starting in 2016.

While this progressive move is laudable, socio-political and psychological realities of local students and teachers should not be summarily dismissed. We ought not to lose sight of the fact that language itself is an ideological and value-laden construct, and that we live in a multilingual society where diverse languages co-exist and compete for domination.

Thus, the challenge in implementing the dual language instruction lies in how the intelligibility of English used in local contexts among linguistically-diverse speakers can be ensured, and in what kind of English will be produced by these speakers.

Obviously, for such multilingual speakers, clinging to Standard English is not an effective solution because they will bring with them their own communicative strategies (both spoken and written), which may deviate from Standard English, but may be effective for ensuring successful communication among themselves.

It is no easy feat to try to understand (both to listen and to read) a language foreign to one'€™s ears and eyes. The use of a foreign language might discourage students from achieving academic success at best, and eventually lead to them dropping out at worst.

Once comprehensibility is achieved in their native language, the acquisition of a foreign language and additional languages can occur with ease. Studies on bilingualism have found that those students who have acquired additional languages have first exhibited mastery in their native languages.

But should becoming bilingual be sufficient for academic success? While evidence abounds attesting to the sufficiency of being bilingual at high school level, we need to go beyond the understanding of bilingualism as simply the mastery of two languages.

Such a widely-accepted understanding is no longer tenable in multilingualism where different languages and language varieties co-exist and compete for domination. As such, bilingual education needs to be viewed and understood from a better vantage point '€” translingualism, which presupposes complete mastery of two or more languages. Yet, it doesn'€™t stop here. It requires that the speakers be able to creatively shuttle between languages, and transform them into a hybrid language, leading to the creation of new meanings.

Thus, unlike bilingualism, where languages are compartmentalized into separate entities and considered fixed, translingualism treats languages as constantly emergent practices, a product of dynamic daily interactions among their users.

Students should be encouraged not only to show mastery in different languages, but to mesh these languages to transform them into a hybrid language carrying new meanings and possibly new grammars.

Bilingual education under this relatively new orientation acknowledges the egalitarian linguistic practices of students. Linguistic censorship is unnecessary, as it may stifle dynamic linguistic practices and language innovation.

It is possible and perhaps surprising that at an early age students (using the rich semiotic resources available to them) demonstrate subtle linguistic meshing by mixing different linguistic codes. If that happens, schools should be seen as a site where linguistic diversity flourishes and needs to be nourished, and where linguistic homogeneity remains a myth.
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The writer is an associate professor of English at the Department of English Language Education at Atma Jaya Catholic University in Jakarta.