"Immersion has to be done using second language teaching-learning strategies"

One of the cornerstones of language immersion is the treatment of the students' original language. In the 1980s, they were Catalan or Spanish, and in some cases Galician. Now, we have students from 166 countries, who at a conservative estimate speak over 200 languages. Last year, with the students who'd just arrived from abroad, out of a group of 19,000 who were at the reception classroom, there were 115 different languages. My postgraduate work was to prepare a course which will be given in January as part of the update of the language immersion programme for teaching staff, as the initial training in this area is pretty scant. One of the shortcomings we have in Catalonia is initial teacher training in universities in matters of second language teaching-learning - which is after all what immersion really is - and in matters such as managing language diversity. There's a very complex sociolinguistic reality in which Catalan speakers are no longer in the majority; when you're teaching, you have to remember that you're teaching groups that don't have the language of the school, Catalan, as their home language. People speak of immersion as a synonym of Catalan education system and it isn't the same. Immersion is a programme where you work on teaching-learning strategies in second languages. School is in Catalan and it's in the settings where students don't have Catalan as their first language where we use language immersion programmes. The tendency of rulings, now handed down by the Constitutional Court, is to want, besides English or another foreign language, for half the classes to be taught in Catalan and half in Spanish, so therefore Spanish also becomes a working language. The philosophy lies in two legal traditions that have clashed. Ours goes back to 1983 and the passing by the deputies in the Catalan Parliament - except for two, who abstained - of the language normalisation law, which was aimed at making Catalan the first language in four areas: teaching, Catalan government public media, place names and the language of administration in Catalonia. The recent rulings, by contrast, say that Catalan should not be the first in any area as they can't rule against what the Constitutional Court says, which claims that Catalan cannot be a preferential language. The government has explained what the reality of the education situation is: individual attention is paid if Spanish is required as a language in teaching - which has been in very specific cases and has therefore never endangered the model of a single educational line - and blocks of curricular contents can be done in Spanish if it's impossible to guarantee an adequate knowledge of this language by students as these are sociolinguistic contexts in which Spanish doesn't have a significant social presence. Our main argument is that the tests that both we and the state apply show that our students know both Catalan and Spanish and that there's no difference with the state level of Spanish. A spectacular refresher process of thousands of teachers was carried out, updating language teaching in a way that was unprecedented in Europe. The main shortcoming is that unfortunately there are still many universities that just don't train the teachers that the country needs. The future of the system depends on initial training. It has to be reinforced with the knowledge of second language teaching-learning strategies. A good immersion teacher is constantly interacting with their students and they aid intercommunication between them with the language of the school. The present situation has to be a chance to improve the training of our teachers. We need to remember that the Catalonia Education Act is also with the Constitutional Court. The ruling might be a turning point as it could either strengthen or reopen what the state says. Despite this, the Councillor and the schools have said that they're not budging; there's a great deal of consensus throughout the whole education system. Neither coexistence nor the model are a danger. Schools have to ensure that by the end of the educational stage, students have the same knowledge of both official languages. It's clear that if Catalan is not the first language at school, this aim won't be achieved, as has happened in Valencia and as happened in the Basque Country.