Bilingual education teachers’ perceptions of the educational climate and policies in the United States and Spain

Abstract

Access to high-quality bilingual education is critical and has evolved in many different ways during the last decades. Given recent efforts to enhance bilingual education, it is important to examine the perceptions of the current education workforce who serve students in bilingual education programs. A hundred and sixty-four bilingual education professionals from Spain and the U.S. participated in the research. They completed a questionnaire about the effect of educational climate and policies in their own countries. Findings show that teachers from Spain rate bilingual education higher than teachers from the U.S. There are significant differences in their general perceptions and insights about resources, collaboration, students, parents and community. Being proficient in two languages seems to have a positive effect on two categories: general perceptions and perceptions about parents. Our findings also suggest that the years of teaching experience influence their responses and there is a need for more professional development in both countries.

The eclectic landscape: examining Spanish secondary school teachers’ beliefs on literary education

“…Teachers' beliefs constitute a field widely explored in various areas of the school curriculum such as mathematics (Piñeiro et al, 2019), natural sciences (Laudadío and Mazzitelli, 2019), social sciences (Altamirano and Pagès, 2018) or musical education (Colás and -Portero, 2018). Also, specifically within linguistic education, in areas such as writing and grammar (Camps and Fontich, 2019), discursive genres (Repaskey et al, 2017) or learning foreign languages (Fernández-Álvarez et al, 2022). In relation to literary education, different perspectives have been addressed, such as beliefs about the role of families in linguistic and literary education (Fons and Palou, 2015), the teachers' vision on training (Romero and Trigo, 2018;Neira, and Martín., 2020;López-Rodríguez and Núñez-Delgado, 2022), or the belief system related to children's literature (Piñero, 2020).…”

The Keys to Developing Communicative Competence as a School Project: A Qualitative View from Teachers’ Beliefs

“…In the specific field of language education and the development of communicative competence, educators' viewpoints have been assessed regarding the teaching grammar and writing [32,33], oral proficiency [34], language teaching and multilingualism [35,36], oral language in class [37,38], initial training [39], literary education [40] and the creation and implementation of school language programmes [10,26].…”