Languages
have always played a fundamental role in the intellectual and social education
and development of students but this is especially true in the Autonomous
Community of the Basque Country where our aim is to achieve true bilingualism.
This awareness highlighted the need for training in this field in order to
break down the customary barriers between subjects and to get a broader view of
the teaching-learning process of languages. We could not ignore the need for
placing our education system, and our future, within the European context and
decided that all our work in this sense should include at least three different
languages: Basque, Spanish and English.
The
project we present here arose from a need to unify class work between the three
languages taught in this school. Each language is an instrument of
communication between those who speak them but these languages are not separate
entities - they are interrelated to some extent. We try to explain our thoughts
with our mother tongue but, if we learn other languages, we can also do so with
the languages we learn.
In his
theory of the interdependence of languages, Cummins (82) proposed that there is
an underlying proficiency, common to the different languages spoken by a human
being, which is common to all of them and which, therefore, it is possible to
transfer a large portion of what has learned in one language to the others.
Clearly, each language has its own specific proficiency, which it is necessary
to know and this is not transferred.
For all
these reasons, the teaching methodology adopted by our School Sagrado Corazón
with respect to the languages taught to our students (Spanish, Basque and
English), must be basically the same in order to allow our students to transfer
the skills they acquire from one language to the other.
With
respect to the School’s ideology, the indications contained in the LOGSE, the
Education Department of the Basque Government
and European educational bodies, the general aim is:
”To
draw up an integrated language programme based on elements common to all of
these languages, those elements that can be transferred from one to the other
and the teaching of which requires methodological coordination, in particular,
and didactic coordination in general”.