Bilingual schools tackle Spain’s language shortfall

Hello everybody, how are you?” asks the teacher, and two dozen Spanish-accented voices reply in unison, in well-drilled English: “I’m fine, thank you.”
It’s back-to-school this week for these Spanish nine-year-olds, which means means being plunged not only into a new class but into a whole new language.
Spaniards have long ranked among Europe’s underachievers in foreign languages and a decade ago Spanish regions began responding by launching intensive English “bilingual colleges.”
Ten years and one big economic crisis later, parents are as keen as ever to improve their offspring’s job prospects by immersing them in English.
“These children are going to have opportunities that their parents did not have,” said headteacher Maria Dolores Villalba.
Her school, the Doctor Tolosa Latour Public College here in the working class Madrid suburb of Vallecas, launched one of the region’s first such intensive English immersion schemes.
But experts warn that for some families, the zeal for teaching in English may be doing more harm than good.
“What they are doing is ruthless,” said Yolanda Juarros Barcenilla, a mother and English teacher.
“It is a very strong immersion which leads a lot of pupils to fail.”
In the schoolyard at Doctor Tolosa Latour, hundreds of pupils with gap-toothed smiles and new bags chattered noisily in Spanish about their holidays on the first day of the new term on Tuesday.
Once inside the classroom, however, they had to switch to English, for in the “bilingual” system more than half of the 22 hours of weekly lessons here are given in that tongue.
“I went to the beach,” one pupil told her teacher, Beatriz Polo. “I played with my tablet,” said another.
The native Spanish teachers must stick strictly to English in classes of science, sports, art and music.
“The idea is for the children to start speaking in English from the first year of primary school or even from infant school,” said Villalba.