ARELLANO ESPITIA, MÓNICA / BRADSHAW BORGE, CARMEN CECILIA / HEATHER, DENISE / KINSELLA, LISA / ORIVE
The MECD / British Council bilingual programme, initiated in 1996 as a unique experiment within the Spanish state education system, is now about to turn 20 years of successful implementation. Since 2008, when the first students finished their Secondary Education stage, we can say that more than forty thousand students have been able to benefit from this programme. The formal agreement between the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport and the British Council states that the aim of the programme is to provide children from the age of three to sixteen with a bilingual, bi-cultural education through an integrated Spanish /English curriculum based on the Spanish National Curriculum and aspects of the National Curriculum for England and Wales. This integrated curriculum has official recognition (BOE May 2000). The implementation of such a curriculum requires a very different classroom approach from the traditional EFL classroom where the focus is on learning English as a foreign language as opposed to studying areas of the primary curriculum through English. The specific objectives of the programme are:To promote the acquisition and learning of both languages through an integrated content-based curriculum; To encourage awareness of the diversity of both cultures; To facilitate the exchange of teachers and children; To encourage the use of modern technologies in learning other languages; here appropriate, to promote the certification of studies under both educational systems.
