Bilingual Education in Asia:
Programs, plans and policies

By Damian Rivers   

Bilingual education is a topic that has been under intense scrutiny within the U.S during the past decade. Whether or not the state should provide biracial families, immigrants and their children with the education required to maintain their native language (e.g., Spanish, Chinese, Korean) is a debate that can be applied to any country where English represents the official language. Countries such as the U.K, Canada and Australia all have significant biracial and immigrant populations, who require tuition in the English language, but should this be at the cost of sacrificing their own mother tongue advancement and maintenance. The reality of many socially engineered bilingual education programs within the U.S tend to focus on teaching the child in their native language for any period up to 7 years whilst at the same time gradually introducing English, the financial cost of educating in as many as 120 languages is in itself astronomical.

In 1996 in California, a group of immigrant parents boycotted the Ninth Street Elementary School in downtown Los Angeles after the school administration refused to allow their children to be taught English, insisting that the children be educated in their mother tongue of Spanish. This event inspired the 1998 California "English for the Children" initiative (better known as proposition 227), which won 61% of the vote opposing bilingual education and successfully dismantled most bilingual education programs within the state.  Later, in November 2000, voters in the state of Arizona passed a similar measure, Proposition 203, by an even greater landslide (63% of the vote). Many other states have since attempted to follow the lead of California and Arizona, sharing the belief that young children should be taught English as quickly as possible in American public schools. It can be said that the majority of immigrants within the U.S are there to seek a better life with more opportunity, for many this opportunity comes with the mastery of English rather than the protection and encouragement of maintaining a high standard in their own native language. As a response to the 1998 vote the state of California has since been teaching immigrant children English through the Total Immersion Method of language acquisition.

Whilst many tend to think of bilingual education in terms of the non-native speaker, there are potential consequences of bilingual education adoption for the stereotypical English speaking monolingual. Theoretically, they could be facing a bleak economic future as multilingual, multicultural speakers from other countries gain an advantage within the domestic workforce taking advantage of rapid globalization, this would leave many monolinguals increasingly bewildered by a growing ethnically and linguistically diverse society, or would it? In a Columbia University study in 2006 entitled “No Entiendo: The Effects of Bilingualism on Hispanic Earnings” researchers found that in non-managerial labor markets bilingualism was rewarded with a higher salary than those who were monolingual speakers, although it was only fractionally higher (2.7%), but in managerial positions bilingualism was not rewarded more than monlingualism, this suggests that issues in salary may be more connected to discrimination in hiring practices rather than the bilingual ability of Hispanic immigrant workers within the U.S.

The general rejection of bilingual education within the U.S is in some ways understandable if looking at the issue from a socioeconomic perspective, but when analyzing the research, which looks at individual development, it becomes apparent that bilingual children are at an advantage to monolingual children in terms of cognitive development. A 14-year study by Collier & Thomas (2004) at George–Mason University found that on standardized tests students who were educated in dual-language schools consistently scored better than those children educated in monolingual schools. The project which was entitled, “The Astounding Effectiveness of Dual Language Education for All” looked at schools where children were educated in one language in the morning and in a different language during the afternoon. Other researchers have indicated that bilingual children have stronger mental agility or what is termed “plasticity”, the ability to solve problems and give opinions in more than a single way.

The above issues are not only relevant to western English speaking countries. Asian countries have their own struggle with the attainment and maintenance of more than one language. When looking at the complexity of bilingual education in Asia the bilingual education debate within the U.S seem rather simplistic by comparison.

Bilingual education within an Asian context is fundamentally different in form and in function from the type of bilingual education currently under debate in the U.S. Asian countries predominately have a great a number of both bilingual and trilingual speakers due to factors such as regional language variations and historical civil divides. Additionally, many Asian countries are made up of various ethnic and social communities who have varying mother tongues. In a significant number of countries there is though, only one medium of education, usually the language of the majority, thus isolating and marginalizing the various ethno-linguistic minorities within such countries. The role of the English language in Asia is primarily as an ‘other’ language and is firstly taught as a subject, then, at the university or college level English itself becomes a mode of transmittance for other bases of knowledge such as history, math and science.

Throughout Asia (even post-colonial environments) the English language is both adored and despised, it is seen as a friend (giving the speaker opportunity and status) and as an enemy (a threat to the nation’s culture and the national language). With such a variety of attitudes toward English, large-scale generalizations are difficult to make, although it is possible to draw two basic parallels between all Asian nations (except for North Korea). The first parallel is that they have all been influenced by the power of the English language, usually in the case of loanwords which have penetrated the national language or mother-tongue (In Chinese an Aspirin is referred to as a Asipilin, In Japanese a Picnic is referred to as a Pikuniku and in Korean a Hotcake is referred to as a hat-ke-i-keu). Secondly, these countries have all been exposed to international media, sporting events, product promotions, movies and celebrities who have all further promoted the English language within the particular country.

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