In the era of globalisation, a bilingual co-teaching model has been adopted to help students better understand world affairs. It also promotes the development of fluency and proficiency in the language of instruction, and in a second target language.
Several international schools in Hong Kong have adopted this model from early childhood education to secondary levels.
According to Professor Joseph Lo Bianco, the chair of language and literacy education at the University of Melbourne's Graduate School of Education in Australia, the model helps open learners' minds to different ways of thinking and exposes them to the cultural assumptions built into all knowledge and human behaviour.
'The method also helps nurture children's practical skills in bilingual and, hopefully, multilingual skills that they can apply in their professional and personal lives beyond schooling,' he says.
The globalised thinking of students is sharpened in a bilingual co-teaching and learning environment, says Dr Sherry Steeley, a resident faculty member of the Centre for International Education, College of Education and Human Development at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. 'Since language and culture are so closely related, students learning in a bilingual setting will have a much broader understanding than those in a monolingual school,' adds Steeley, who specialises in multicultural and multilingual education.
Bilingual education refers to the method of using two languages to teach subject matters in schooling or at a tertiary level. 'The most recent and promising developments are the Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) method which originated in Europe over the last decade,' Lo Bianco says.
CLIL is the umbrella term describing both learning another content or subject, such as physics or geography, through the medium of a foreign language, and learning a foreign language by studying a content-based subject. The basis of CLIL is that content subjects are taught and learned in a language which is not the mother tongue of the students.