Estudio longitudinal del programa de enseñanza bilingüe CBM en un centro docente de Educación Primaria de la Región de Murcia

Resum

According to the government's strong determination to backing a bilingual educational model and the commitment made by the Region of Murcia, (whereby all education centres must work under the aforementioned programme by 2020), each and every learning institution and personnel working in them see ourselves obligated to work under and deepen the application and understanding of CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) method proposed by the European Union. Under said method (known in Spanish as AICLE), are contained the learning of curricular subjects not included in Second Language Acquisition. This methodological shift, in addition to the inadequate following from the Autonomous Community of the CBM institutions (Centros Bilingues de la Region de Murcia by its Spanish acronym), required a need to design a course of action in our educational centre and demanded all involved parties to converge to facilitate an effective and genuine implementation of the program. To that end, it was decided to create a bilingual Research and Technology Department which would coordinate all activities throughout the study, with the following goals: 1) Instruct the teaching staff in CLIL methodology and in several other techniques to help in the teaching/learning process as well as reaching an adequate figure of educational personnel proficient in foreign languages. 2) Acknowledge the achievements of the pupils in non-linguistic subjects when compared to the rest of curricular subjects and the acquisition of L2 inside of the programme. 3) Answer the parental demands when facing a programme using English in its entirety. To meet these goals, we employed a mixed methodology which the investigatory method used was Design Based Research (BDR by its acronym) which allowed us to create continuous design, development, analysis and redesign cycles in each and every one of the seven years this two-phase longitudinal study has lasted: preliminary work to be able to become a CBM centre (first 3 years) and work under CBM authorised centre (4 last years). The sample used for this study will match the tracking of the entirety of the students starting the CBM method in 2012 as well as their parents and teaching staff being brought into the programme by each year. The main conclusions of this here study extracted are: 1) The use of bilingual methodology (CLIL) in combination with collaborative learning, the daily usage of the interactive digital whiteboard in the classroom and also self-edited materials ease the full integration of the programme. 2) The self-edited materials for the school website and the various non-linguistic subjects have significantly enriched the teaching/learning process, adding meaningful situations for the student body, therefore improving higher order concept. 3) Planned educational activities have supplied the teaching personnel with the necessary skills and abilities to cope with the implementation of bilingualism in the classroom in a successful manner, in addition to the gain a greater number of qualified teachers than needed. 4) The scores achieved by the students in non-linguistic subjects were found to be higher in comparison with other subjects not included in the programme. Furthermore, an improvement in Second Language Acquisition has been noted. 5) The degree of satisfaction of pupils, parents and teaching staff with the CBM programme has soared throughout the process of implementation and eventually recognize more advantages than the alternative in the use of the programme. Finally, after our research experience, and given the complexity of the program, we would like to highlight the appropriateness of including in the organization chart of the center a specific Department which articulates the whole process of deployment and implementation of this type of educational programs.