•Bilingual education involves teaching academic content in two languages, in a native and secondary language with varying amounts of each language used in accordance with the program model.
•In the bilingual education system subject content will be delivered in two languages, mostly the native language of the learners and a second language which is closed connected to cultural needs.
•Bilingual teaching is the best way to prepare for university education and international business.
•The sooner a child starts learning a second language, the better it will speak this language. If this language is English, the most widespread international language of business, medicine, science in general and, the better this child will perform in life.
•If English is used as a language of instruction, taught subjects are at disposition equally in the native language as well, as research has proved. As a plus, using a foreign language in different contexts, e.g. school lessons held by different teachers, help children become more and more proficient.
•By learning a foreign language students become more sensitive to their own language. So, students‘ knowledge of certain native language features (e.g., writing letters) will increase, as they have learned about this in another language.
•The first modern bilingual schools program worldwide which have been supported by government control and coordination started their program 1950 in the eastern part of Germany in the Lausitz. This special Region had a closed connection to Poland and so example schools were opened to force the bilingual understanding with the background that the eastern part of Germany were closely connected to Russia to execute in general Russian language as a second language across East Germany as a political act to support the Russian politics also in the basic school education.
•Later on West Germany followed 1963 based on the Elysee-Contract between Germany and France which supports partnership exchanges also based on language background. Especially in border regions schools were equipped with a special bilingual French-German program. The Goethe-Gymnasium in Frankfurt am Main in 1969 start to implement their bilingual program as the first German school with a German-English bilingual branch and one of the founding schools of the International Baccalaureate.
•In America the bilingual education has a long history already. The first Bilingual Education schools opened prior to 1800, were not public, and were chiefly parochial institutions. German, French and Scandinavian immigrants opened bilingual schools.
•Many of these first „bilingual schools“ were not even bilingual; they were non-English speaking schools where English was taught as a subject.
•In 1963 the first modernBilingual Education program was developed for Spanish-speaking Cubans and Anglos at Coral Way Elementary School in Dade County, Miami, Florida. The program was supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation.
•The Bilingual Education Act of 1968 — passed during an era of growing immigration and an civil rights movement — provided federal funding to encourage local school districts to try approaches incorporating native-language instruction. Most states followed the lead of the federal government, enacting bilingual education laws of their own or at least decriminalizing the use of other languages in the classroom. The basic idea were to make a migration for those ethnic groups very difficult, as a result of the political pressure caused by problems with these immigrants. Although the program was initiated as a means to discourage immigrant to settle in America in the long run it developed to be a positive influence to the general social development.
•Since the mid-1990s bilingual approaches to schooling and higher education have become popular in parts of South-east Asia, especially in Thailand and Malaysia where different models have been applied. Thailand, is an exemplar of the use of English for integrated studies in Math, Science and IT, taught by non-native English speaking Thai teachers. This project is under the auspices of the International Study Program of BuraphaUniversity. Panyaden School is an example of a private bilingual school in North Thailand that provides its students with a Thai-English education (each class has a Thai teacher and native-English speaking teacher).
•South East Asian countries followed the need of a bilingual education based the fact that the business world is placing their connection mainly on English language as well on the development of the change of the diplomatic language from French to English in the last 15 years.
•Indonesia is one of the latest countries to understand the need for bilingual education as a core quality to be competitive in the globalization of our world.
•The difficulties and disputes characteristic of the US experience have not been replicated in these Asian countries, though they are not without controversy. Generally, it can be said that there is widespread acknowledgment of the need to improve English competence in the population, and bilingual approaches, where language is taught through subject content, are seen to be the most effective means of attaining this. The most significant limiting factors are the shortage of teachers linguistically competent to teach in a second language and the costs involved in use of expatriate native speakers for this purpose.
