Action Research on Use of Bilingualism (English & Dzongkha) as Medium of Educational Instruction for Teaching Social Studies in Grade Six Students

Abstract

The Education System of our country, Bhutan has initiated for intersection of Geography and History curricula as Social Studies in lower classes for providing opportunities to explore students’ prior learning with historical and geographical content designed to support in acquisition goals of learning History and Geography as segregated subjects in higher classes. Such integration of subject is deemed as socio-cultural, geographical and historical knowledge are gathered and accumulated from home and community settings. Therefore, to instill concepts and facts in the children at early stage, bilingual educational instruction has felt very necessary for primary students so that they can grasp the essential and core concept of subjects to determine for enhancing their cultural and historical facts. This miniature action research will evaluate the outcome of using bilingualism as an educational instruction for imparting concept of social studies contents. The targeted population for this action research was grade VI children studying in Dangchu Primary School under Wangduephodrang Dzongkhag. This study will also explore the benefits of using bilingualism as an educational instruction for teaching social studies by adopting National Language (Dzongkha) as an alternative medium of instruction for explaining and discussing for clarifying contents in subject. The Scaffolding and Trans-language strategies were applied during the social studies teaching periods and positive results were recorded after the intervention strategies were used and the academic performance was drastically improved with intervention strategies and also encouraged students for more classroom participation and concepts were clarified. Bilingualism as medium of educational instructions proved to be the best teaching strategies to improve herself/herself in teaching in turn it enhances learning outcome of the students.