One of the biggest challenges encountered after the implementation of bilingual education in Andalusia, begun 15 years ago, has been students' academic performance. Enabling students to handle classes taught in a second language, without this affecting students' learning levels, continues to be the goal of a large part of bilingualism programs. In the pursuit of this objective, the Bilingual-Me European project has been launched, in collaboration with the UCO’s 'Attention to diversity and bilingual education' research team, coordinated by Víctor Pavón, a professor and former head of the implementation of the bilingual program at the University of Córdoba, in collaboration with the universities of Porto (Portugal) and Palermo (Italy). This is a project that seeks to create an integrated bilingualism program evaluation and accreditation system to guarantee their efficacy without affecting academic performance.
To tackle the problem, Bilingual-Me seeks to address all the sectors involved: teachers and students at the Primary and Secondary levels, language schools, undergraduate students, future teachers, as well as the educational authorities; in short, the entire academic community.
The project includes a diagnostic component, in which the problems that students really have in the use of discursive skills are detected; and an innovative part, working with different language centers at the international level. The aim is for students to feel comfortable in any bilingual subject, understand the teacher better, and know how to exploit their skills in an optimal way.
From the point of view of Linguistics, the cognitive processing of concepts is being studied in greater depth, which depends, fundamentally, on students knowing how to effectively understand and convey messages using language. The research team on the project insists that "if one does not master a specific type of language related to the content, they cannot learn it properly," says Pavón
Bilingual-Me seeks to create a tool with this dual evaluation capacity that can be used for future bilingual programs and teachers, developing a protocol with a set of criteria to determine whether or not a bilingual program is effective. "If the language is not used properly, the contents are not learned properly. The innovation lies in determining the degree to which these two aspects are related to and influence each other," he added.
Participation in this European project has given the research group the opportunity to network and work with international professionals in this field, do their small part to bolster research into Education, and enjoy all the benefits of working on an educational project at the European level.
The BILINGUAL-ME - “Towards a model of integrated bilingualism” (2020-1-ES01-KA203-082544) project is co-financed by the European Union through the ERASMUS+ call. The content of this report is the exclusive responsibility of the University of Córdoba, and neither the European Commission nor the Spanish Service for the Internationalization of Education (SEPIE) are responsible for the use to which the information published here may be put.
"This report is part of the project “CONSOLIDA-UCO ECT2020-000810", funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by European Union “Next Generation EU”/PRTR”.