Guest Lecture

Students’ language achievements, teachers’ beliefs and the use of multilingual resources in Basque schools.

In the Basque Country, education is multilingual because the two co-official languages Basque and Spanish (the minority language and the dominant language in society), together with the foreign language English, are taught and used as instructional languages. Although parents have the right to enroll their children in one of the three linguistic models available, the reality is that most of the parents choose instruction mainly in Basque regardless of their mother tongue. This latter fact together with the fact that Spanish is taught only as a subject in many schools, creates the concern about the level of proficiency that the students will get in those two languages. This presentation starts by looking at the historical perspective, early stages of Basque in education, the introduction of English in schools and the current multilingual context. Then, it summarizes the results of several studies carried out focusing on different areas such as the assessment of the proficiency level achieved in the three languages towards the end of compulsory education and the beliefs regarding language teaching and use in the classrooms. Finally, the results of research on using pedagogical translanguaging with the aim of enhancing the students’ language acquisition will be presented.