Bilingual Education in Spain: An Analysis of L2 Methodological Requirements and Non-Linguistic Disciplines Within Primary Education Legislation

Abstract

This article analyses the main legislation in Spain regarding Bilingual Education in the stage of Primary Education. Firstly, it divides Spanish regions into monolingual and bilingual. Later, it deals with the main legislation enforced in Primary Education, and carefully analyses three main aspects: teachers’ L2 level, teachers’ methodological requirements, and the non-linguistic discipline or disciplines included in bilingual programs together with the subjects’ language or languages of delivery and assessment. The first aspect, L2, is labelled following the different levels of the European Framework of Languages. As for teaching methodology, information has been classified as “not mentioned”, “recommended” or “required”. With regards to subjects, there are four different labels: “compulsory”, “optional”, “not mentioned”, and “not specified”. A high degree of heterogeneity is observed in two of the three areas analyzed. These differences among regions do not seem to be connected with their monolingual or bilingual nature. Finally yet importantly, it should be assumed that India and Spain are not close realities in some aspects. However, the study described above might help researchers, teachers or educational authorities to reflect upon some issues which are derived from CLIL(Content and Language Integrated Learning) methodology implementation in schools.