Conocimiento del catalán y castellano por parte del alumnado inmigrante

Authors

José Luis Navarro SierraSalto de línea Ángel Huguet CanalisSalto de línea Universitat de Lleida. Facultat de Ciències de l’Educació. Departament de Pedagogia i Psicologia. Lleida, España.

Abstract

The knowledge of Catalan and Spanish in migrant studentsSalto de línea Salto de línea During the last decade, the linguistic, cultural, ethnic and identity heterogeneity of Catalonia has grown considerably. As a result, our schools have been transformed into in centres where ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic plurality has become increasingly evident. However, in contrast to other Spanish regions, one of the main characteristics of Catalonia’s Educational System is the organization under parameters of bilingual education. Thus, apart from promoting a high degree of competence in Catalan, which is both vehicular and language of instruction, a good knowledge of Spanish is also pursued. In this context, different studies make evident the key role played by a good command of the language of the school. This is so both in terms of academic success as well as when dealing with integration and social cohesion. Within this framework, this study is focused on the Guissona High School, in La Segarra district (Western Catalonia), where due to several reasons the importance of the migratory phenomenon has grown progressively for the last decade. The aim of this paper is to show an analysis of the linguistic competences of immigrant students at Guissona School, taking as a reference the level of linguistic competence of their autochthonous classmates. In short, our work analyses the development of different abilities in Catalan and Spanish of a sample of 28 immigrant boys and girls and it is compared to a group of 93 local students in their same educational level

Keywords

Catalan, Spanish, linguistic knowledge, immigrant students.