Bilingual teaching is in most countries a very young teaching systematic and with that we don’t real have fixed methodologies and we cannot say this or that methodology is the most common or best for the students. The methodology and system your school will be able to choose is always connected to social and traditional background of the students as well as the pre-knowledge of students’ second language.
We cannot say this or that methodology and system is the very best to use, every school needs to make a decision on its own and most of the time mixed methodologies and systems can be found and are also suggested, tailored to the real needs.
We just want to point out with our articles and advise that based on our supervisions and evaluations bilingual teaching is a very serious teaching methodology and in most monitored cases we have to say until now there is no awareness existing about the difference between mono- and bilingual teaching.
A bilingual lesson has to be differently executed than in a monolingual lesson system. Teachers have to use very different methodologies and didactics specially living up to the bilingual needs. And unfortunately based on our supervisions most of the time we observed that bilingual teachers are left alone from responsible school stakeholders in their trouble of seeking useful different methodology for bilingual teaching.
That is why we installed a bilingual assistant who is responsible for the preparation of useful bilingual lesson material in close exchange and cooperation with the responsible bilingual subject teacher, as well as monitoring lesson execution and installing special tailored seminars to support our bilingual teachers in their struggle of creating meaningful and effective bilingual lessons. Our main problem still is that responsible stakeholders until right now don’t understand that bilingual teaching is a very different teaching system and it is not just only a subject lesson in another language.
Additional to execute a correct bilingual lesson teachers need to have special skills of methodologies and a basic understanding about the uniqueness and special need of those teaching methods.
The “bilingual triangle” from Mr.Wolfgang Hallet is the best description of bilingual teaching:
At the following pages you can find descriptions about general bilingual teaching systems.
