Is Bilingual Education Worth The Cost In Turkey?
Certain schools offer bilingual education to their students. Some believe that this has major advantages and think it is important to encourage young people to include a second language in their program. However, there are also people who argue that bilingual education has major disadvantages and will not be beneficial in the long run. This leads us to an important question: ‘’Is bilingual education really beneficial for adolescents?’’
Firstly, it is undeniably true that a bilingual education improves brain function and helps young people concentrate better. Many studies have been made regarding this topic and studies show that bilinguals have advantages when it comes to problem-solving, awareness, divergent thinking, and attention control. The reasoning is that they need to be able to process two different languages and be able to switch from one another. As cited in the article ‘Bilinguals Working Memory (WM) Advantage and Their Dual Language Practices’ written by Eunju Yang and published in 2017, these studies have shown that bilinguals’ ability to focus with distractions and switching between languages has improved their working memory capacity. Along with improved brain function, bilingual education is also proven to train a child’s ear for music. The article Effects of Culture on Musical Pitch Perception written by Patrick C. M. Wong, Valter Ciocca, Alice H. D. Chan, Louisa Y. Y. Ha, Li-Hai Tan, and İsabelle Peretz, published in 2012, cites that speaking different languages affect auditory perception. This is because of the pitch and tone differences used when switching from one language to another. Learning a second language when young is also beneficial for the child’s future since a lot of jobs look for bilingual people to reach a bigger audience. If the children have bilingual education, they are likely to have more job offers and advantages in their careers.
On the contrary, there can also be disadvantages to bilingual education. First of all, providing this education can be quite expensive and some may not be able to afford it. Also even if a child is sent to a school where there is a dual language education, the number of classes taught may not be enough and might not be consistent. Since language is something that cannot be learned without enough practice, in schools where second language courses are not enough, children may not be able to benefit from the advantages and since it is expensive it might result in just being a waste of money.
In conclusion, even though a bilingual education has minor disadvantages like its price, it is beneficial for adolescents in many ways. It not only sets them up for success in the future but also helps with concentration and even music.
Work Cited:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/pros-cons-bilingual-education-early-childhood-n-elgendy
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5532599/
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0033424
