Acceso usuarios
José Luis Blas Arroyo
For some decades now, as a consequence of changes in the politics of Spain, the compulsory education system in the autonomous Spanish region known as the Comunidad Valenciana has offered a varied programme of bilingual education: Spanish and Valenciano, an autochthonous variety of Catalan, alternate according to various curricular programmes as the main teaching languages. This paper examines the objectives of each of these programmes, as well as data which serve to evaluate the results generated by the application of the said programmes, i.e. history, enrolment details, geographic distribution, infrastructure, teacher training, etc. All these variables coexist within a very specific sociolinguistic context, which is unlike that of other bilingual regions of Spain. The existence of two clearly differentiated linguistic regions, tied in with the progressive abandonment of Valenciano over the last few centuries, is reflected in the lack of uniformity in the state of bilingual education in this region. Nevertheless, even the strongest critics concede that there has been a qualitative advance away from a monolingual model to the present situation where the teaching of Valenciano and teaching in Valenciano have an undeniable presence.
