Plurilingüismo y educaciónuna aproximación a la educación plurilingüe desde la perspectiva de las lenguas minorizadas

Abstract

Globalization has brought forth important changes for both social perceptions of languages and their role in school. The European Union has adopted plurilingualism and multiculturality and the guidelines it has set for the educational systems of the UE States are inspired by linguistic ecology and acknowledge the protection of minority languages. However, if we analyse the process from the point of view of those territories with more than one official language in an asymmetric position –being one a recessive language– as is the case in Galicia, the concrete changes introduced in linguistic education, such as CLIL (a methodology scarcely assessed in such contexts) have mostly had a contrary effect, as demonstrated by sociolinguistic data. The legal changes introduced in Galicia in 2010 in relation to linguistic education have entailed great readjustments in language teaching. The results of this new situation, both in terms of competence and use, have not been assessed, but sociolinguistic data show a decrease in the use of Galician. Therefore, the linguistic project that has been put into effect in Galicia in relation to language teaching is paradoxical, since the results are in stark contradiction with the objectives it is supposed to be ruled by in the first place.