A tale of two cities: The ideological debate on equity in bilingual schooling
Abstract
This study analyses the implementation of CLIL in two monolingual regions of Spain: Madrid and Andalusia. As a matter of fact, as these two regions have been mostly governed by political parties with contrasting ideologies, this may have affected the way in which CLIL has been implemented. Firstly, this paper will offer a literature review of the outcomes that the CLIL programme has produced in the two regions according to research. Secondly, the implementation of CLIL in each region will be examined by means of a document analysis of the CLIL regulations introduced in the two contexts, on the basis of the following themes: CLIL introduction and development, pupil selection, teacher training and compensation, and the inclusion of other languages. Finally, the discussion will explore whether the different outcomes of CLIL in the two regions may be the result of the ideologies guiding the implementation of the programme and will establish some sociolinguistic principles required to frame bilingual competence in the wider social debate on inequality. The greatest ideological difference observed is pupil selection, which may lead to language poverty in certain layers of society.
Keywords:
Publication history
Table of contents
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” (Dickens, 1859, p. 4). At the turn of the century, bilingual language policies in Europe were exemplified by the sentence appearing in Dickens’s novel serving as inspiration for the title of this paper: “The noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.” In other words, these policies often failed to consider the different effects that they may have on an unequal society, the same measure creating ‘the best of times’ for some students and ‘the worst of times’ for others.
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