Spanish bilingual and language education: A historical view of language policies from EFL to CLIL

Abstract

The profound evolution that Spanish language education has experienced since the passing of the first modern educational law in 1970 has led to improved students’ proficiency. In this sense, traditional foreign language teaching has been gradually substituted by Bilingual Education in the country to promote language learning, intercultural competence, and mobility; however, reviews in the field have not examined language education in all the Spanish regions but rather they have only considered isolated regions or compared some of them. This paper provides a historical analysis of Spanish language education, reviewing its evolution since 1970, and comparing the country’s bilingual and monolingual regions. Findings show that differences among territories mainly concern the areas and number of hours devoted to foreign language teaching and teacher linguistic requirements. Content and Language Integrated Learning is the main approach to Bilingual Education followed, whereas English is the main language of instruction in all regions.