Tertiary Bilingual Education: The Iberian Spanish Case Versus Other Multilingual Contexts

Abstract

One of the main goals of this book, and especially of section one, is to discuss the importance of English in mediating knowledge in tertiary education where English is considered a medium of instruction in order to provide students with an international perspective. English for specific purposes (ESPs) start to resemble Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) courses, which suggest that there is room for improvement in both cases (Kenny et al., English for specific purposes instruction and research. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). A second question to be discussed is how to best accommodate the use of non-target languages in content-based education. The L1 use in content-based settings is common when students exhibit a low proficiency in the L2 (Martínez-Adrián et al., 2018). It is argued that using learner’s L1 may be beneficial in the L2 classroom. This bilingual learning context turns out to be rather complex when there is more than one L1, which is something common in multilingual countries like Spain. In this sense, this chapter intends to draw attention to different learning scenarios in bilingual education considering the findings published more recently. In particular, a few current Spanish/English bilingual programmes are discussed since they are interested in promoting bilingualism while they allow the use of Spanish as a learning resource in the classroom.