What is the Bilingual Method ? Explain The Merits and Demerits
Bilingual Method:- The basic philosophy is based on the concept that when the child learns the mother tongue, he connects the meaning of The words with his own experience because the mother tongue is learnt in real life situations.
The only requirement is to provide mother tongue equivalents without duplicating the situations. C.J. Dodson has remarked that the teaching learning process is facilitated if only mother tongue equivalents are given to the students.
Merit of Bilingual Method
1. Makes use of the linguistic habits formed during the learning of the mother tongue.
2. Students laugh by this method and learn much more than the children taught with some other method.
3. Method is suitable for all types of schools both rural and urban.
4. Very economical for the time, labour and energy of the teacher, which he would have wasted in creating real life situations.
5. Stress is on speech practice.
6. Requirement of audio-visual aids is minimum because they are not needed much in this method.
Demerits of Bilingual method
1. Sometimes it becomes difficult to bring together the word meanings and the child's experience together.
2. The grammar is not taught systematically to the learners of this method.
3. Other skills like reading and writing are ignored.
4. There are certain words, phrases and idioms in English that cannot be translated into Indian languages without losing their true effect.
5. There are certain structures in the English Language which do not have the corresponding meaning in the Indian language.
6. Develops the habit of translation thinking. This interferes with the natural thinking of the students.
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