WHY A BILINGUAL EDUCATION
As the world evolves into an international community, the need for a second, perhaps even a third, language becomes more crucial. The National Governors’ Association resoundingly adopted the premise that international education, which includes teaching and learning about other countries, their citizens, and their languages, is as important as economic prosperity, national security, and world stability.
New research on childhood development reveals that the ability to learn languages is highest between birth and age 6. Immersion programs maximize a child’s natural curiosity and ability to learn a second language during this important window of opportunity. Benefits of immersion education include:
- Immersion provides children with an expanded vision of other cultures, insights into themselves, and new and different ways of thinking.
- Immersion programs produce students who speak the second language as naturally as their first language.
- Results from immersion programs reveal that their students score equal to, or better than, non-immersion students on reading and math tests.
- Results from Canadian and U.S. research show that most children in immersion programs not only learn the second language, but also their own language with clarity, and that they excel on both foreign-language and native-language standardized tests.
- Students of foreign languages have access to a greater number of career possibilities and develop a deeper understanding of their own and other cultures.
Why French?
French is spoken by 120 million people on five continents. It is the language of the forty-five countries that form La Francophonie, a kind of French commonwealth. Although more people speak Chinese, Hindi, and Spanish, French is spoken in more countries – over a greater geographical area - than any of these, making French second only to English as a global language. French is also an official language of NATO, INTERPOL, and the United Nations.
