A study of the effect of bilingual education on achievement and psycho social characteristics of ethnic children in Iranshahr

Abstract

In every corner of the world, young children are learning languages at home that differ from the dominant language used in their broader social world. These children arrive at school with a precious resource: their mother tongue (referred to as L1). Typically, when minority and indigenous language children begin preschool or primary school, they must learn the language of the majority group in their region to fit in socially and succeed academically. Most often, these children are educated exclusively in the second language (referred to as L2). Though exceedingly common, these majority languages educational programs do nothing to support minority language children to develop competence in L1. Likewise, many types of researches conducted about problems of these children showed that they don t have enough language competence in instructional language resulting in academic failure and may induce some psychological problems such as social maladjustment, lack of self-confidence and self-efficacy, stress and anxiety. According to the Santrock (2001), if students have to begin to write and read in a language other than their mother tongue and their competence in their first language is neglected, the second language has negative effects on the performance of the children with other languages. Cummins (2003) suggested that the reason behind the weak educational performance of children is the negligence of their cognitive abilities in their mother tongues. newline