Evaluation of Linguistic Education Policy Options for Bulgarians and Ukrainians in Moldova[EN]
Evaluarea opțiunilor de politici privind educația lingvistică pentru bulgari și ucraineni în Moldova[RO]
Оценка вариантов политик в отношении лингвистического образования для болгар и украинцев в Молдове[RU]
Evaluation of Linguistic Education Policy Options for Bulgarians and Ukrainians in Moldova
Bilingual education is the education that is carried
out in two (generically more than two) languages, in other words when the
instruction or medium of instruction is carried out in two languages. Bilingual
education refers to the entire curriculum across the educational cycle or to
the part of it, where the proportion of one language against the other differs
and can change over time. Bilingual education is not when bilingual pupils
study in monolingual schools.
For bilingual education the content of the educational program and the curriculum should be composed of the disciplines present in two languages. Bilingual education starts when more languages are used simultaneously for the content of the educational plans and of the curriculum (sciences, math, social disciplines) rather than just teaching the language in itself. Another aspect of bilingual education resides in the goal of it. In short, the goal of bilingual education is to promote, maintain, and cultivate the existing bilingual persons and at the same time to provide comprehensive support to bilingual persons by deep and professional knowledge of several languages. The latter is called additive bilingualism. Additive bilingualism provides for the active addition of the command of another language through educational programs. Additive bilingualism is opposed to the so-called subtractive bilingualism that aims at the replacement of one language with another one, mostly the language of the dominant group. In the light of these definitions, only additive bilingualism can be truly classified as bilingual (multilingual) education.
Bilingual models. Given the clear distinction between additive bilingualism and subtractive bilingualism, further on, one can classify bilingual education based on its objectives. Bilingual models could aim at the linguistic planning of some role of the language; it can have an ideological orientation to have a linguistic or cultural diversity in the society. Specialized literature identifies three major groups of bilingual education: transitional models, maintenance models and enrichment models.
