More than 900 students attend a total of 21 schools: For four years, a large-scale pilot project for bilingual education has taken place in Bavaria. Now, the responsible scientists of the Catholic University of Eichstätt published the first results - they call them "sensational".
"Bilingual education is a clear cognitive plus for children," said study author Heiner Böttger, Professor of Didactics of the English Language and Literature, SPIEGEL. This was proven for the first time with the study. The services of the children, who are taught bilingually, are consistently better than those of their peers.
The experiment is based on the concept of "learning in two languages". For the lessons from the first grade in all subjects takes place in German, sometimes in English - depending on how it fit the topic. Explanations and translations are not provided.
"The children learn the language quite naturally, just as a child would do, who grew up bilingually from the beginning," said Böttger. The students are not overwhelmed with it. It even works so well that even at the end of the first grade the students could not speak fluent but fluent English.
"Impressive achievements"
The performance of the students was checked by the scientists in the second and third school year with standardized tests. The bilingual teaching students achieved "equally good to significantly better results in the subjects of mathematics and German," it says in a pre-publication of the study.
In English, the bilingual students even showed "impressive achievements". At the end of the third year of school, they corresponded to or exceeded those of students at the end of the fourth grade.
One reason for the good performance of the students is the high cognitive requirement of bilingualism, said Böttger. "When kids use two languages at the same time, they have to make decisions all the time." This keeps the child's brain flexible longer and works like a muscle training - which then also helps in mathematics lessons.
More than 80 schools had applied for the experiment, a quarter chose the scientists. It was important to select as many different districts and school types, Böttger said. Which classes were allowed to participate, the scientists decided by chance - to rule out that the parents influenced this decision.
The teachers, who subsequently taught the students bilingually, had to speak English very well. "Native speakers were but mostly not," said Böttger. In order to learn the pedagogical concept, the teachers received special training. The response to the experiment was consistently positive.
Both teachers and parents almost unanimously recommended continuing bilingual education. Partly also more classes should be furnished - the demand from outside is high.