Benefits Of Bilingual Education

One way to address this problem is to require students to take two years of foreign language to graduate high school. By requiring two years it allows the student to become accustomed with the language; it also mirrors the minimum requirements for entry into college. According to François Grosjean, the author of Bilingual: Life and Reality, most of the world’s population is bilingual. While quantifying bilingualism is tricky, Grosjean reports these rough measures: Europe: 56% Great Britain: 38% Canada: 35% United States: 17%. By just looking at the rough estimates of these numbers we see that the United States are falling far behind the rest of the world. There are many advantages to becoming or being bilingual. Among them is that you will have better and more job opportunities. The executive director of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese, Emily Spinelli, said "We are in a global economy and we need students to be ready to fill jobs …show more content…
Any honest scale will tell you that the costs of foreign language instruction dwarf the benefits. Think about it: Even ignoring teachers' salaries, we're currently burning two years of class time per graduate. The payoff? Making less than one student in a hundred fluent. He goes on to say: the world usually has what economists call "diminishing returns": you can improve outcomes by spending more money, but the more you spend, the less efficacious each dollar becomes. The fact that two full years of instruction have almost zero effect implies that massive spending increases would be required to noticeably raise foreign language fluency. Think about all the Canadian adults who don't speak French after a decade of required