Bilingualism

Burton (2001:1) defined bilingual education as an education involving two languages as a media of instruction; for instance, in the United States the instruction occurs in the majority language such as English and in a minority language, such as Spanish or Chinese.

Bilingual education as stated in www.wikipedia.com can be categorized into several types: transitional bilingual education, two-way or dual language bilingual education, and late-exit or developmental bilingual education.

The first type is transitional bilingual education. This involves education in a child's native language, typically for no more than three years, to ensure that students do not fall behind in content areas like math, science, and social studies while they are learning English. The goal of this program is to help students’ transition to mainstream, English-only classrooms as quickly as possible, and the linguistic goal of such programs is English acquisition only.

Next type is two-way or dual language bilingual education. These programs are designed to help native and non-native English speakers become bilingual and biliterate. For instance, in a U.S. context, half of the students will be native speakers of English and half of the students will be native speakers of a minority language such as Spanish. Dual language program is one of the most effective forms of bilingual education. It has students study in two different ways: (1) a variety of academic subjects are taught in the students' second language, with specially trained bilingual teachers who can understand students when they ask questions in their native language, but always answer in the second language; and (2) native language literacy classes improve students' writing and higher-order language skills in their first language. Research has shown that many of the skills learned in the native language can be transferred easily to the second language later. In this type of program, the native language classes do not teach academic subjects. The second-language classes are content-based, rather than grammar-based, so students learn all of their academic subjects in the second language.

The last type of bilingual education is called late-exit or developmental bilingual education. Here, education is in the child's native language for an extended duration, accompanied by education in English. The goal is to develop bilingualism and biliteracy in both languages. This program is available to students whose native language is not English, and also less common than transitional programs.

From the explanation above, it is obvious that immersion is different from bilingualism. Language immersion uses the target language as a teaching tool, surrounding, or "immersing" students in the second language. The immersion students have almost similar skill of using target language, while in bilingual education, all of the subject materials are taught in two different languages where they are majority and minority language. In other words, the bilingual students are significally different in terms of target language skill. The goal of immersion program is to acquire a target language acquisition as well as the subject material taught. In contrary, the goal of bilingual program is to acquire two target languages acquisition (majority and minority language) as well as the subject materials taught.