Genuine bilingual
Genuine bilingual
education possible
I refer to the article Bilingual education remains a fantasy
for Indonesian schools by Simon Marcus Gower, published on Monday
July 1. This questioned the capability of Indonesian private
schools to offer genuinely bilingual English/Indonesian
education.
Gower made the claim that bilingual schools can only be
effective if, "there are parallel languages in existence within
the society or community that the school is part of... It is
simply not possible to suppose that this kind of parallelism of
languages exists in Indonesia".
Oh? Sekolah Cita Buana is a private school offering a
genuinely bilingual curriculum partly because of careful planning
and effective teacher recruitment and development. However, the
main reason is because the school definitely exists within a
wider community that is itself bilingual.
Approximately 80 percent of our students come from an
Indonesian family background where at least one parent is a
native English-speaker or is fluent with English as a second
language. Gower may not realize that huge numbers of Indonesians
have studied, worked or lived in English-speaking countries.
Thousands of Indonesians, including many parents of Cita Buana's
pupils and the school's teachers, are married to native English-
speakers.
Every member of the Board of Yayasan Cita Buana and every
member of the school council is bilingual. The majority of
teaching staff are comfortable communicating in either language
in all modes. Most of our children happily read, write and chat
in either language, and at high school matriculation level our
students directly, and successfully, compete for university entry
in English and Indonesian.
We know it is possible to attain genuine bilingualism in our
curriculum, and we know that is what our parents like about us.
There are still things to improve and attitudes to change,
however bilingualism is certainly not a fantasy at Cita Buana,
and does hold educational reality and value for our students.
RADEN DUNBAR
Jakarta