University and Primary Schools Co-Teaching Together: Challenges Towards a CLIL Training Program

Introduction

The sociodemographic scenario in Spain, Europe and the rest of the world has exponentially changed during the last decades due to a series of causes of different nature, and unfortunately most recently because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Add to this, the quick growing of globalization, the use of the English language as a lingua franca (Coleman, 2006; Lasagabaster, 2022), as well as the use of new technologies, make those global changes to be reflected on the educative systems (Barrett et al., 2014). That is the reason why teachers from today and tomorrow need to be trained on certain innovative and interdisciplinary characteristics in order to face the renewed, changing and equalitarian international context (Council of Europe, 2016). Nowadays, schools host a diverse students’ profile (Aljure et al., 2014; Julius and Madrid, 2017), whether local or foreign students, and teachers must prepare them to be competent in any part of the world, following the UNESCO’s 2014 guideline, as well as they also should be prepared for the after-Covid-19 world (Ramos et al., 2021).

Accordingly, the implementation of CLIL entails a whole revolution referring the way of teaching some non-linguistic subjects of primary and secondary education in Spain. CLIL philosophy, even with its lights and shades, gives response to this new universal outlook where students need to be trained not only on the linguistic dimension, but also on a cultural dimension (Nurutdinova & Bolotnikov, 2018) for a better adaptation to a globalized world. Such implementation represents a reference model to gradually increase the learning of languages (Lasagabaster et al., 2010), since pre-service teachers should be competent to work in the growing number of bilingual¹ schools (Romero-Alfaro & Zayas-Martínez, 2017).

The main learning objective through CLIL approach is to achieve that the students participate actively on their own learning by relating any content with their environment (Marsh, 2002). Therefore, it is essential to strengthen their cognitive development on their metacognitive skills as much as the skills for life. This way, students are prepared to implement what they learn in class into the real world (Coyle et al., 2010; Hu, 2019). Using English as a working language not only helps to improve the students’ linguistic competence, but also educates them on the global competence (Deardorff, 2014), what will educate them to take part of international teams and to be able to adapt to those teams in their future professional life. But, above all, having this global competence and knowledge about the real world will make students be aware of their own culture, and this fact will contribute to a better conflict resolution and to live in the basis of equality and democracy. Besides, CLIL depicts a flexible model for universities (Zayas-Martínez & Estrada-Chichón) that might be adapted to any particular context of every region.

These are the reasons why every educator trained at a global scale should wonder whether teachers are well trained and in turn training their students in order to live and work on different changeable societies and cultures (Zabala & Arnau, 2007). Among the diverse ways to give answer to this question, the authors consider that a fundamental solution is bilingual education.

Nonetheless, speaking of language policies in Spain implies to tackle a complex situation because of how bilingual education is seen in the different autonomic communities; this is a matter that hinders establishing a homogeneous training in Spain as a whole. For instance, some autonomous communities began their bilingual programs in the scholar year of 2004-2005 while others, like Extremadura, waited until 2011-2012 so the public centers could hold their bilingual tracks² with public funding. The certified linguistic level of the teachers was also a matter of concern because some regions required a C1 level from the Common European Framework of References for Languages (CEFRL) while in other regions it was only necessary to certify a B2 level (Ortega, 2015).