Guest Editorial

Abstract

This Volume 14, Issue 4 includes six selected best papers from the VIII International Conference on Bilingual Teaching in Educational Centers (CIEB), held at the University of Jaén in October 2022. Bilingual education initiatives have been firmly taking root across the European continent (and increasingly, in Asia and Latin America) for the past two decades. In particular, CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), considered to be the European approach to plurilingual education, has been steadfastly advancing within the language teaching arena and evolving in exciting new directions which have posed novel challenges to researchers, practitioners, gate-keepers, and educational authorities alike. These new avenues for CLIL development include extending its implementation from infant education through to tertiary degrees (as research -e.g. Pérez Cañado, 2018 - has voiced that the effects of CLIL grow stronger with time), setting in place diversity-sensitive bilingual education systems which can increasingly cater for all types of students (Pérez Cañado, 2021), ensuring quality assurance within CLIL programs in order to determine those traits which characterize successful pedagogical practices (Pérez Cañado, 2016), or polling stakeholders’ self-reported perceptions, which are particularly relevant in our field, as “their interpretations and beliefs are crucial to understand how the CLIL programme is socially viewed, understood and constructed, and the expectations it raises” (Barrios Espinosa, 2019, p. 1). These are precisely the key issues which the present volume seeks to address.