COMPULSORY TASK #1: Investigate multilingualism in your school

Is Multilingualism that easy to achieve?

As we know, multilingualism is becoming a global phenomenon that is overpowering monolingual societies due to globalization and cultural openness. We are facing a society in which having access to certain services or information means having a big menu of languages to choose from. Individuals more and more are being exposed to so many different languages that it increases the need for them to acquire additional languages. And a multilingual society who is ready for this challenge starts at school.

Taking a public primary school as an example, we will do a little survey so that we can see first-hand to what extent multilingualism is present in the schools. 

C.E.I.P. Sant Julià – Sabadell

Sabadell is the co-capital of Vallès Occidental and has a population of 207,814 inhabitants, who 22,968 of its inhabitants are foreigners. (*)

The Public Pre-school and Primary school Sant Julià is located in the northeast of Sabadell, in a medium-low class neighbourhood. They embrace different cultures and students in their centre: Spanish, Catalan, self-called gitanos, Latin-Americans, Africans and Asians.  However, only 15% of their pupils are foreigners or have a language different from Catalan or Spanish as a mother tongue.

Within the department of teachers, the school is staffed by 4 non-native English teachers and a few translators and mediators for Arabic. Although the centre has several projects in mind, there is one in particular they try to stand out: teaching English in an integrated way.

At the age of 4 (P-4), students are introduced English for the first time one hour per week- divided into two half hours-. In this splitting of the groups, teachers work with two small groups (12 students each), and the teaching is on the whole orally. They listen to songs and sing along, they learn class expressions such as “Can I go to the bathroom, please?”, “Thank you” or “Hello/Good-bye”. Teachers do mimics and work with visual materials so the children can follow the lesson effortlessly, following a highly communicative approach. Besides students have a storyteller once a week. At this stage, what the school aims at is for the pupils to have a first contact of the new L3 and work on basic everyday expressions used in class naturally.

At the age of 6 (1r curs), just when students start learning how to read and write, teachers introduce books as part of their class material together with a weekly session (1h per week) to work on their oral skills. According to their educational plan, students are expected to reach an A2 level of English (CEFR) at the age of 11, that is, in their last year of school.

As mentioned before, the school is concerned about teaching English in an integrated way, meaning integrative and constructive, not instructive.  That is why they adopted CLIL methodology in their curriculum. When the kids are 10 (course 5), they experience the difficulty of learning an L3 not only through explicit language instruction but also through content and language integration (CLIL), since the school offers a combination of both approaches. Science becomes the subject for this approach to work effectively, and apparently it does. Currently teachers devote 1h per week (of the total 2h/week of science) to learn about energy and sustainability with English as vehicular language in the class. 


This methodology was first introduced six years ago in this particular educational centre. In this sense, it is quite an innovative pedagogy which follows the European guidelines of foreign language learning and teaching. Within this particular approach of teaching, teachers follow the rule of “only English” in class, so they take on a monolingual approach during that time. It goes without saying that kids cannot completely succeed in this area of speaking as naturally as they would in their L1 and L2 class in English.

The school also fosters respect for a multicultural citizenship. Regarding cultural diversity, they celebrate national and international festivities such as “Sant Jordi”. For Christmas they have their students’ parents coming over to see their sons’ performances like Christmas carols –in Catalan and English-. They also celebrate “Halloween” as an English festivity together with “la Castanyada”, which is a Catalan holiday. A weak point worth mentioning is that they do not foster any other culture beyond English. Still they spread the belief of tolerance, respect and equality through behaviour and class activities all over the centre.  

While being there something caught my attention and I had a glance at their classrooms’ doors and facilities. They happen to have labels on every single door (in three languages –Catalan, Spanish and English-) and it states the type of room you are about to enter in: “secretary’s office, secretaría, secretaria”, as an example. Apparently, it is something the school agreed on so that their pupils get used to the three languages they are exposed to. The professionals’ reflection was that during the first schooling years students tend to function visually (semiotics is important), then having these labels wherever they go around the building might help them to become comfortable with it; especially it will help in the sense of English (L3) become something natural and part of their education.

All these things considered, this particular school is aware of the changes society is undergoing nowadays -linguistically speaking-. They are trying to adapt these changes to their curriculum and to their way to teaching, following, indeed, the European directives for foreign language learning in innovative ways, and respecting the bilingual contexts, too, of the students. Hence, multilingualism becomes the key concept that is leading them to a real attainment of linguistic diversity even if, for example in the case of integration of migrant populations’ languages, they still have a long way to go.


(*)accessed 20th January 2015. Retrieved from http://www.idescat.cat/es/ (2014)