Investigating the coexistence of the mother tongue and the foreign language through teacher collaboration in CLIL contextsperceptions and practice of the teachers involved in the plurilingual programme in Andalusia

Resumen

In content and language integrated learning (CLIL), as in any other type of bilingual education, two languages are used to promote cognitive and language learning. Whereas in the bilingual classroom the two languages are always present, in CLIL they may appear together or be used in totally separate circumstances. Although the relationship between languages is different, in CLIL, where the foreign language is the minority language employed, we uphold that the purported benefits of combining both languages should not be underestimated in this type of education. The objective of this study is to find out if the collaboration among teachers, particularly between language assistants and content teachers, with the subsequent use of two languages in the same classroom, may result in the development of strategies that will ultimately contribute to the improvement of the teaching process, the learning of content matter and also the development of language skills and language awareness. By analysing the perceptions and reflection on the actual performance of teachers involved in CLIL programmes in Andalusia, a Spanish monolingual autonomous community, this article aims to identify the existence of collaborative work among teachers, the advantages of such collaboration and the benefits of using the two languages.