Needs of the ‘Bilingual Schools' Program in Andalusia Regarding EFL Classrooms and Language Assistants

Introduction

After 15 years of the implementation of the Multilingualism Promotion Program in the Andalusian Autonomous Community (Spain) in 2005, there are still many challenges that have not been solved in spite of the number of studies that have been published warning about those issues. The mission and concern of this chapter is to present findings from a research conducted between 2011 and 2013 at 15 Spanish-English bilingual schools in Seville, Spain, compare those findings to recent studies in the same and different Autonomous Communities, and provide a list of recommendations/actions that could be taken in order to improve, if possible, the bilingual program offered by the regional Board of Education.

Part of the results and conclusions presented here are part of a Ph.D. thesis entitled Los papeles que desempeñan el ‘Auxiliar de conversación’ y el ‘profesor-coordinador’ en Centros Bilingües español/inglés de Sevilla. Un estudio empírico de casos/Performed roles of the ‘language assistant’ and the ‘coordinating teacher’ at Spanish-English Bilingual Schools in Seville. A multiple-case empirical study (Sánchez-Torres, 2014), whose main objectives were (i) to describe and contrast the ‘language assistants’ (LAs), the ‘coordinating teachers’ and their functions before and after their experience at bilingual schools (BS); (ii) to describe this human resource (LA) in use (pedagogical intervention); (iii) to describe and evaluate: (a) the participants’ pedagogical and professional communicative interaction and (b) their planning of specific actions to establish possible connections between these aspects and the relative “success” or “failure” of the experience; and (iv) to provide recommendations of possible improvements based on (a) the experiences and perspectives of the participants and (b) the results of this and previous studies.

The main objective of that research was to study bilingual public education in Andalusia, specifically the use of language assistants (LAs) in English classrooms at different levels of compulsory secondary education, as offered in bilingual schools in Seville. On a greater scale, the Multilingualism Promotion Program (MPP, in Spanish: Plan de Fomento del Plurilingüismo) of this autonomous community was also studied by focusing on issues related to the implementation and use of LAs in English as a foreign language (EFL) classes and presenting (i) some of the changes that the MPP, along with its different sub-programs and actions, brought to the English classroom, (ii) the weaknesses and challenges to the success of the ‘Bilingual Schools’ and the LAs Programs, and (iii) recommendations for improvement.

Apart from presenting some of the results and conclusions of that research, this chapter will look into some recent research carried out in the same and different autonomous communities of Spain (Andalusia, Extremadura, Madrid, and Murcia, among others). The purpose of that presentation and comparison is to shed some light on the field of bilingual education, and English teaching in bilingual education specifically, and the use of LAs in the Andalusian schools that implement this mode of education. Thus, the main objectives of this chapter are:

• 1.

  to describe the changes that the LAs experience regarding personal, pedagogic-professional, and linguistic-communicative aspects,

• 2.

  to evaluate the fulfillment of the BS Program objectives and the LAs’ and coordinating teachers’ functions,

• 3.

  to describe the presence or absence of team teaching in the English classroom and the changes that have taken place in it,

• 4.

  to highlight the weaknesses and challenges to the success of the BS and LA program,

• 5.

  to offer suggestions for improvement from the stakeholders’ point of view,

• 6.

  to compare those findings to those of different studies, and

• 7.

  to provide a list of recommendations for improvement.