The Department of Education, Universities and Investigation, through the Department of Educational Innovation, undertook during the nineties a series of projects (Early Introduction of English, INEBI or BHINEBI) in order to stimulate plurilingüal competence of the Basque Autonomous Community students.
Through these projects, theoretical and practical training has been given to English language teachers, curricular materials have been elaborated both for Elementary, Primary and Secondary Education, and schools have been endowed with suitable materials to work the English language from a communicative approach.
In this talk the process followed will be explained briefly, we will analyse the training model used with teachers and specific examples of activities of materials elaborated will be shown in order to work with the different competences through a foreign language.
At the same time, following the aims described in the guidelines of Educational Innovation for the years 2007-2010, the Department of Education, Universities and Research has started the Plurilingual Experience in 36 public centers of Secondary Education. The experience consists of offering students the possibility of studying whole subjects in English or French. During the talk we will explain the characteristics of this experience and the conditions of participation will be explained and reports of some teachers who are currently carrying this experience out will be shown.
Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Education Sciences for the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Teacher of Elementary, Primary and the first cycle of Secondary Education for 15 years in state schools of the Basque Autonomous Community. English teacher trainer since 1999. From 1995 to 2000 she was the chairperson of the BETEA association (Basque English Teachers Association). Currently she is the coordinator of Foreign Languages Innovation of the Department of Education, Universities and Research of the Basque Government. She is an author of several articles about the Introduction of the English Language at an early age (Elementary Education) and she has taken part in different conferences and congresses as a lecturer on topics related to AICLE / CLIL (Content and Integrated Language Learning). She obtained the European Award to Innovation in Teaching and Learning Languages in 2005 as the coordinator of the project " Dip, dip, dip ".
Translated by Mariano Llorente
