Plurilingualism in Ceuta

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Abstract

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) emerged during the 1990s in order to provide an answer to language diversity in European classrooms. Furthermore, the increase in the number of migrant languages from our students combined with the use of a wide number of minority European languages illustrates a whole new teaching scenario that needs to be observed and studied. The focus of this article is placed in both the emergence of plurilingual pedagogies and teachers’ beliefs toward the implementation of such pedagogies and the use of different languages and registers of the students in the classroom. The main issue under consideration relies on how the use of different mother tongues together with the use of foreign languages for instruction under a CLIL provision may affect the national language of the curriculum. The case under study describes the situation in the Spanish city of Ceuta where a group of bilingual Dariya-Spanish–speaking students have developed their primary education under an English CLIL provision program. When they began their secondary education, due to school internal organization, they shared the classroom with a group of bilingual Dariya-Spanish–speaking students whose curricular language throughout their primary education has been Spanish as the official language of the curriculum. The main aim is to compare both groups in terms of their mastery of Spanish as the official national language, so as to know the extent of influence that studying under a CLIL program in English has had, and whether it has somehow affected their acquisition of Spanish.