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What are CLIL and EMI?

What is it like to set up an Immersion programme?

An interview with Francisco Lorenzo about the Andalusian Bilingual Sections programme, one of the cornerstones of the Andalusian government’s Plurilingualism Promotion Plan (2005).Read more about the programme.

How was the Andalousian programme set up?

Well, the Andalousian programme was set up because there was an acknowledgement that there was a learning deficit there, and the solution was, according to European policy, that some sort of bilingual teaching was needed, and it was some sort of panacea. Then, they produced this big kind of project called Language Promotion Plan with European money, basically something like 160 million euro. It was big investment at the time, and it had the financial help and advice of the German and French administration, and diplomats basically. So, it all started and at the beginning it was a big idea. People were a little bit sceptical, and it was a big thing. It all started with French and German, but obviously English took over. So, that was the beginning. The end result now is something like one thousand bilingual schools which vary in degree of success and implementation.

What have been the main cornerstones and successful outcomes of the programme?

Well, in a way there are a couple of successful policies that the whole network wrote about. The first one is the obvious one, which is basically the rationale behind it all, which is language competence. It is proven that it means gains, actual and obvious gains, in language competence. Students are more fluent, have a better knowledge of the language, are more confident when they talk, they cover all the skills, and there is some sort of social success in a way because there was a social demand and now there is this response. This was the major success. In more particular terms, looking inside schools, we can see that there is more coordination by teachers, that means that the schools are close-knit in a way, you know you don’t have separate parts, teachers tend to work together. Obviously, the school communities have to pay a price for that, and there are major risks. One of them, I don’t like the word segregation but it’s true that has come up, is how equalitarian bilingual education is in these monolingual settings. We are working on this, it’s not an easy problem because perhaps you want to offer bilingual education to all students but while all students can work in a bilingual setting, perhaps you are hurting their knowledge of the language and the learning of the content itself. I can see that’s a major problem. Another major problem is that of the complexity that it brings, turning around the whole school system, and it has the good side of complexity, there are major questions and big solutions, but at the same time handling the many factors that intervene is extremely hard.

What lessons can be learnt from this experience for CLIL programme design and internationalization?

I think that what multilingual education and bilingual schools bring is some sort of quality seal. Usually parents tend to send kids to school where it’s just business as usual, I mean, they have to go there as, obviously, education is extremely important. But now, you can see that there is some sort of distinction in the fact that those are bilingual schools and they are easily recognizable because of that. The whole concept of quality control, of innovation, of transparency in the learning process, of the fact that students, and everybody, the whole society, knows the few outcomes: the difficulties, but also the gains, and also the fact that you have so many international buddies intervening in the whole process. You know, you have the Trinity exams, the British council also intervene, so this gives a lot of credibility to the whole thing. But at the same time, difficulties are there. You can be optimistic, but you have to be realistic at the same time.