Acceso usuarios
The new political space shaped by the European Union has boosted the learning of foreign languages, however, the English language has acquired a higher profile than any other foreign language. The learning of English as the main foreign language in Spanish schools is overwhelming and since 1993, when the Educational Reform was passed, its learning has been established from the age of eight onwards. Thus, in the Spanish bilingual communities such as the Basque Country, Catalonia and Galicia students have to deal with a third language from a very early stage. However, despite the spread of this early teaching, there are very few studies available on its effectiveness in formal contexts. Thus, this paper analyzes the impact of early teaching on students' written production, the language skill that theoretically should benefit least from a methodology which is basically focused on oral production and comprehension. The results demonstrated that the early teaching has a positive effect on the communicative competence in writing shown by the experimental students (started at the age of 8) when compared with the control group (started at the age of 11). These results are explained in terms of Cummins's (1980) Common Underlying Proficiency model of bilingualism.
