It is true that ESL teachers are primarily focusing on those students, whose English is weak, with the main aim of making it strong. Learning English is really important for students from various corners of the world. But now the main question is whether ESL teacher can help students maintain their home language. To some extent, there are mixed results to it. Some teachers have to go through the home language maintenance tests before they even get the license to be ESL teacher. It clearly portrays that the teachers have to help students maintain their home language along with English for the best language proficiency in this regard.
Cognitive effects of bilingualism:
Highlighting some of the long term cognitive and educational effects of bilingualism helps in portraying one strategy. You can see those benefits covered widely in media. Economic benefits supposed to be another long term based effect of the home language maintenance. Some research has already concluded by stating that bilingual children of the migrants are known to have higher earnings during adulthood than only their English dominant counterparts. So, even if you have to gain a good knowledge and idea on English, that does not mean you have to stick to that one language only. You have to be pro in other languages too.
A positive bilingual strategy:
For enabling that positive bilingual strategy, it always needs to be backed by another language policy. There are some languages like Australian and language in educational policies, which are consistently resulting in mono-lingualism unfortunately. But, there are some other alternatives to that norm as well. With the help of ESL teachers and their ESL Platform, you can easily get hold of not just English but other languages too. Even though they will focus more on English, but they will give preferences to other languages as well.
