The bilingual program in Andalusia according to the language assistants

Abstract

Over the past decades, bilingual programs have become widespread in Spanish monolingual autonomous regions. One of the distinguishing characteristics of these programs is the presence of native language assistants from multiple countries. Despite this bold initiative, there are only a few studies that investigate the assistants' notions about the bilingual program in depth. This led to the design of a non-experimental descriptive study which used a 79-item questionnaire in Likert scale format as an instrument to collect information from language assistants of the Autonomous Community of Andalusia in the academic year 2020/2021. A total of 275 responses were obtained. The results show that the assistants' views of the bilingual program are mostly positive, especially when assessing its impact on improving students' linguistic skills in the foreign language. Likewise, language assistants express satisfaction with regard to their performance as well as their sense of integration in the schools. However, difficulties arise during coordination with teachers. Language assistants describe classroom dynamics and didactic approaches as prioritizing teachers' discourse over students' performance. Over all, the conclusions show an optimistic scenario derived from the analysis of the representations of the assistants and their role in the bilingual program, leading to the validation of the strategy and the identification of potential elements for its improvement.