How do language experts conceptualize bilingualism and bilingual education in a monolingual context? A service-learning approach
| Autor | Marta Jaén Campos/Daniel Martín González |
| Cargo del Autor | Universidad Complutense de Madrid/Universidad Complutense de Madrid |
| Páginas | 95-116 |
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CAPÍTULO 5
HOW DO LANGUAGE EXPERTS CONCEPTUALIZE
BILINGUALISM AND BILINGUAL EDUCATION IN
A MONOLINGUAL CONTEXT?
A SERVICE-LEARNING APPROACH
MARTA JAÉN CAMPOS
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
DANIEL MARTÍN GONZÁLEZ
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1. BACKGROUND AND RATIONALE
In the last two decades, Europe has witnessed a considerable spread of
bilingual education programmes. In fact, a specific educational ap-
proach to bilingual education has emerged as a European construct;
namely Content and Language Integrated Learning (hereafter CLIL).
Spain, which has traditionally obtained poor results in foreign language
competence, has shown enormous enthusiasm for the implementation of
these pedagogical models, particularly in monolingual regions where bi-
lingual education was restricted to a few private or international schools.
Some current figures illustrate this reality: nearly half the students
(45,5%) in Primary Education were enrolled in some kind of bilingual
education programme in the academic year 2020-2021 (Ministerio de
Educación, 2022). Madrid, the context of the present study, offered these
programmes in 63,3% of the state Secondary schools in the same aca-
demic year (Comunidad de Madrid, 2021).
This scenario has entailed a rapid pedagogical transformation which has
also received criticism from different sectors and which is normally
found in the Spanish press. Some of the most extended comments claim
that CLIL is elitist (Martín-Arroyo, 2017), that children cannot be
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considered ‘bilingual’ (Marías, 2015) and that the fact that they learn
content subjects through a foreign language is detrimental to content
learning (Público, 2016). This criticism largely differs from the evidence
found by research. For instance, it has been revealed that that the aca-
demic performance of Spanish students enrolled in bilingual education
is better (Dobson et al., 2010), with no detrimental effect to the devel-
opment of their mother tongue (San Isidro, 2019).
Logically, content teachers have been the focus of extensive research
because of the professional transformation that the implementation of
CLIL has meant for them. However, language teachers, whose school
subject runs parallel to CLIL subjects, have not received sufficient at-
tention. There are many dimensions of the teachers’ profession which
deserve to be investigated (e.g. teacher education or classroom dis-
course). The one which this study is concerned with has to do with the
language teachers’ perception of bilingual education and the pro-
grammes which are being implemented in their region.
1.2. BILINGUALISM, BILINGUAL EDUCATION AND CLIL
Bilingualism is a rather abstract concept which could be broadly defined
as a person’s ability to communicate in two languages. Yet the idea of
what ‘the ability to communicate’ really means has evolved throughout
time. Language teaching has traditionally endorsed monolingual ideolo-
gies in which the target language must be separated from other lan-
guages (Cenoz & Gorter, 2020; Cummins, 2017) and the aim is to attain
the linguistic competence of native speakers. Moreover, in the case of
English, the target has always been British English and the RP pronun-
ciation, the standard variety. But the dominance of a globalized econ-
omy and the growth of mobility have favored a shift towards multilin-
gual ideologies in which the ‘ability to communicate’ implies using a
repertoire of different languages which reflect the linguistic trajectory
of each individual (Cenoz & Gorter, 2020).
Although the broad concept of bilingual education is by no means new,
it has gained relevance in the last decades as a suitable approach to pro-
vide citizens with the necessary linguistic proficiency in international
languages (as is the case of English). The main premise is that teaching
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