‘Me Siento Pequeña’ – A Visual Approach Towards Students’ Experiences with the Transition from Elementary to Secondary School in Spanish-German bilingual Education

Abstract

As the education system is organised around horizontal and vertical transitions and because bilingual education (BE) and Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) in languages other than English (LOTE) are quite rare, it is difficult to guarantee the continuity of CLIL in LOTE (Harbon & Fielding, 2022). Additionally, little is known about the possible causes and effects of such language and content learning disruptions on students’ learning pathways (Chambers, 2020). Through visual narratives and open-ended questionnaires, this paper examines how 37 young learners in two Spanish-German bilingual classrooms either experienced or envisioned their bilingual and CLIL classes and how they perceive the transition from elementary (4th grade) to secondary school (5th grade). The aim of the research is to better understand CLIL and BE transitions in LOTE from an emic perspective, by gaining some insights into students’ past and current experiences and expectations, thereby collecting ideas for successful transitions that incorporate their perceptions. Our results show that pupils' perspectives through their drawings and answers can be assigned to four main categories: difficulty and workload, self-perception, image of the school and teachers, and social environment at school or in BE. We discuss the implications of our findings for BE and CLIL LOTE, in general, and for dealing with educational transitions more effectively, in particular.