Language education and institutional change in a Madrid multilingual school

Abstract

This article examines the institutional transformations of language-in-education programmes in Madrid, linked to wider socio-economic processes of change. Drawing on a research team's ethnographic revisit, we explore how wider processes are impacting everyday discursive practices in the Bridging Class (BC) programme, first implemented in 2003 to teach Spanish to the children of migrant workers in state schools. We focus on the coexistence of this programme with the recently implemented Bilingual Schools Programme, aimed to equip students from working-class areas to compete in global markets. Based on the analysis of interviews and classroom interactions with BC students at one secondary school, in connection with the wider socio-historical processes underlying language-in-education policies, this study reveals a process of discrediting of the BC that contributed to a local hierarchisation of programmes (and its participants). Further implications are discussed regarding how individuals collaborated with each other under these institutional conditions.

Keywords:

• language education
• social mobility
• institutional change
• social hierarchisation
• academic trajectories
• ethnographic revisit

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Luisa Martín-Rojo for her invitation to study the data and her support both in the analysis and the process of writing this article. We are also grateful to Ben Rampton, the editor Eva Codó, and two anonymous reviewers, for their comments on earlier versions of this text. Needless to say, the misapprehensions are ours.

Funding

Data analysed in this article were collected under the support of Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación [grant number HUM2007-64694/FILO] through the research Project ‘Escuela y multilingüismo: una crítica sociolingüística a los programas lingüísticos’ directed by Prof. Luisa Martín-Rojo.

Notes

1. Names of schools and participants in this article are pseudonymous.

2. Co-official State languages in Spain (such as Catalan or Basque, among others) have also been taught as second languages to newly arrived students of migrant background, in institutions of the corresponding regional governments, in order to ensure newcomers’ success in mainstream education (see, for example, Nussbaum & Unamuno, 2006; Trenchs-Parera & Patiño-Santos, 2013).

3. See particularly: Guide for the development of language education policies in Europe (Council of Europe/Language Policy Division 2007); Recommendation on the use of the Council of Europe's Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) and on the promotion of plurilingualism (Council of Europe 2008); Multilingualism: an asset for Europe and a shared commitment (Policy document COM(2008)566).

4. See the official statistics in the Spanish Ministry of Education's Webpage: http://www.educacion.es/mecd/estadisticas/educativas/dcce/Datos_Cifras_web.pdf

5. Programa Integral de Aprendizaje de Lenguas Extranjeras [Comprehensive Plan for Foreign Language Learning], Ministerio de Educación de España, 1 de Octubre de 2010.

6. Translation of excerpts intents to represent the grammar as produced in the original.

Additional information

Funding

Funding: Data analysed in this article were collected under the support of Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación [grant number HUM2007-64694/FILO] through the research Project ‘Escuela y multilingüismo: una crítica sociolingüística a los programas lingüísticos’ directed by Prof. Luisa Martín-Rojo.