Bilingual Education

An elementary school in Urbana is piloting a dual language program teaching kindergarten classes almost entirely in Spanish.

Illinois Public Media’s Sean Powers reports that the program has been well received by parents and that students have been outperforming educator expectations. This hour on Focus, we’ll talk about bilingualism and how we think children best learn to speak a second language. Host Craig Cohen talks with Eurydice Bauer, an Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the UIUC about how we think the brain switches between one language to another and if learning more than one language at the same time negatively affects a child’s proficiency in one or the other. We’ll also talk with Joseph Wiemelt of Urbana High School.