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Message started by Nigel on Nov 17th, 2010 at 6:11pm

Title: English-speaking children in Catalan schools
Post by Nigel on Nov 17th, 2010 at 6:11pm
New advocacy group for parents of English-speaking children in Catalan schools

Dear Tortosa Forum,

I am writing to you on behalf of a group of parents of English-speaking children in the Barcelona area. Our children attend Catalan schools which, which public or independent, lack special programmes for native speakers of English. By the end of January, our group should be registered as an association. Once officers are in place and a membership roll formalised, we plan contact policy makers (at Educacció and with political parties), the media, and academics to begin making our case.

We believe that publicly funded schools should stream children who are native or near-native speakers of English into enriched, content-based English classes. We believe that programmes tailored to the English skills these children already posses will better enable them to use written and spoken English with the same depth and breadth of skills and purposes for which they are being educated to use Catalan. We believe that fostering a dual-language, cosmopolitan identity in these children, both as learners and as future citizens, will be of incalculable benefit to Catalan society as it meets the challenges of a knowledge-based, globalised economy whose lingua franca is English.

In the long term, we would like to lobby for public funding of English-Catalan bilingual education. Dual-language schooling is a well-established option in publicly funded primary and secondary education in New York City, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and some German Länder. (In France, the sections internationaux  provide a lower percentage of classroom time in the second language of instruction.) It often involves quotas of native speakers to ensure the viability of both languages as languages of socialisation, and graduates fully bilingual individuals who academically out-perform students from other schools. As an added benefit, it creates a far more attractive environment for both foreign companies and foreign researchers.

Some fifty individuals have expressed interest in joining the group, among them a number of Catalan academics and scientists. 

I hope this initiative will be of some interest to you and Tortosa Forum readers, and that we can count on your support as we move forward.

Best wishes,

Dr. John Stone
Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Alemanya
Universitat de Barcelona
Gran Via 585
08007 Barcelona

email: john.stone.bcn@gmail.com

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