Bilingual Education and Attention to Diversity: Key Issues in Primary Education Teacher Training in Spain

Introduction: The Challenge Of Attention To Diversity In Bilingual Education

A quality education requires the existence of an educational offering adjusted to the new social demands. If our educational system seeks to respond in consonance with two key elements of today's society, diversity and multilingualism, it needs to face two important challenges: an inclusive approach to education and the promotion of bilingual programs in mainstream education. Various international organizations have highlighted this need by proposing measures, initiatives and action plans aimed at achieving an education in line with the current social reality. A first example is found in the review of European policies on language teaching in recent years since, as a way to improve the communicative competence of foreign languages in EU countries, the European educational authorities set out to ensure the supply and to promote the implementation of bilingual programs (Eurydice, 2017; Marsh, 2002). A second example can be seen in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development objectives, where the fourth objective focuses on the need to ensure inclusive, equitable and quality education that promotes lifelong learning opportunities for all students (UNESCO, 2017).

The need for an inclusive educational model, together with the spread of bilingual education throughout compulsory education in European countries such as Spain, have highlighted the need to respond to the needs of all students participating in bilingual programs while following the principles of attention to diversity. The concept of diversity has been frequently narrowed to exclusively refer to Special Educational Needs (SEN) students (Amor et al., 2018; Ritter et al., 2020). However, in this chapter, we share the assumption of diversity as inherent to any human being as a result of developmental traits that cannot but translate into different learning rhythms (Arnáiz, 2003). Thus, from this perspective, the teaching-learning process is designed from the premise that all students naturally differ from one another (Casanova, 2011). Diversity, particularly in bilingual education, should not only cover SEN students but also those with differing learning styles, diverse levels of linguistic competence, varying attainments of knowledge in different subject areas, a wide range of degrees of motivation and ways of engagement as well as different cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Concerns about elitism and discrimination in connection with bilingual education have given rise to controversies in an attempt on the part of the scientific community to address the following thorny question: Does the generalization of bilingual programs, with added linguistic and cognitive challenges, increase rather than decrease segregation of students with learning difficulties? Bruton (2013, 2015, 2019), Gortázar and Taberner (2020), and Paran (2013) take a critical view on the state of bilingual education in Spain as they hold that bilingual programs foster inequalities in education by leaving weaker students behind. However, their critical stance is not shared by authors such as Coyle et al. (2010), Marsh (2002), or Pérez-Cañado (2017, 2019), who acknowledge, as an unprecedented benefit, the fact that when bilingual programs are mainstreamed in every stage of compulsory education they do offer a wider range of students further opportunities to improve their linguistic competence from which they were previously excluded: “bilingual education has officially been advocated as an instrument of social cohesion since it aims to facilitate access to quality education in foreign languages for the whole population which once was the prerogative of the elite” (Barrios 2019, p. 5).