Bilingual Immersion Education

Bilingualism is the ability to understand and speak two or more languages to at least a conversational ability to understand, and be understood by others. 

Bilingual Immersion Education is the use of two or more languages for teaching and learning curriculum knowledge in educational institutions from children’s early childhood to tertiary education journey.

Biliteracy is both the goal and the method by which students become able to speak, listen, read and write competently in more than one language.

Research and evidence demonstrates that humans are quite able to learn and use a number of languages at any age without becoming confused or held back by knowing and using more than one language. 

From 2017 the Labour Government with the leadership of Hon Minister Aupito William Sio and the support of Pasifika academics and researchers reviewed all the current research.

The  local and international research found that becoming bilingual allows us and our children to draw on many aspects of:

• Wellbeing to be able to express our intergenerational Identities,

• our belonging to family events, celebrations, community, churches, schools, organisations; 

• our cultures and links to our older generations, our ancestry and history; 

• our pride and self confidence, our hopes, dreams and aspirations for the future, and take up leadership roles and responsibilities. 

The widespread national Lalanga Fou community fono consultations in 2018 demonstrated that our Pasifika families overwhelmingly agreed with these evidence based findings. 

The fono consultations supported the Government’s initiatives to rejuvenate and raise the status of our languages among Pasifika communities and the wider Aotearoa NZ society.  Feedback from the fono recognised  it is vital for parents and caregivers  to be actively involved in our childrens’ education. 

In 2019 Government agreed to fully fund Bilingual Education programmes from ECE to Secondary. These education based programmes using Pacific languages and English for learning  are generally needed for most children to become fully bilingual and biliterate. Most Pacific families are struggling these days with the pressure of “English only” messages and finding our children are often preferring to speak English at home and with friends and relations. 

Increasingly many jobs in NZ are asking for the ability to speak, read and write in a Pacific language/s. 

The many current bilingual messages and encouragement from Churches and Government agencies are raising the status and value of our languages and cultures for learning and use in everyday life in the wider society. 

The usual marker of being a proficient bilingual is the  challenging ability to understand and tell jokes in both languages. 

In our  education settings, a closely linked skill is the ability to read and write in two languages to be able to understand, and be understood by other writers and readers. 

Because reading and writing is often overlooked in everyday conversations about bilingualism, we now call this ability biliteracy. 

Linguists and educators research is showing very strongly that being bilingual is a rapidly growing advantage in the world. 

Ako, Poto, Ilo and Atamai in school work is shown by  confident bilingual students who have many cognitive advantages showing that old fashioned ideas about bilingualism promoted by the monolingual colonial powers are just not correct.

Without being bilingual, many of our young people stop attending church, stop participating in family events and special occasions, and withdraw from family events and connections with their grandparents. 

We now know bilinguals can learn to transfer knowledge and concepts learned in one language and use them in the other language to their advantage.

More recently, educational linguists from Europe and the USA (Baker, 2022; Cummins,2022) have begun to use the term multilingualism for individuals - meaning the need to be able to speak two or more languages and some of their formal and informal types of slang, dialects and registers.