In September 2018 I showed up to my first day at CIFP Manuel Antonio in Vigo, Galicia (Spain). I would be a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant for the next ten months, meaning I would co-teach English language classes with the English teachers at my school.
It would take some time to fully describe the Spanish education system in one shot (you can learn more here if you’re interested), but I will explain the type of school I was placed at. ‘CIFP’ is the abbreviation before every vocational school and it stands for ‘Centros Integrados de Formación Profesional.’ These centers are free, publicly funded vocational schools, typically for students aged 18+. These centers provide an alternative to studying bachillerato (pre-college schooling) and an alternative to attending university. Students who complete these two-year cycles are then prepared to enter the workforce with credentials.
These vocational schools teach everything from aeromechanics to hospitality and tourism, depending on the particular focus of each center. At CIFP Manuel Antonio, there are courses in areas such as cooking, restaurant services, tourism, applied chemistry and so much more. However, not every course training is programmed into the bilingual department, so only certain vocations receive English class. During my placement I taught primarily in the hospitality department which included future chefs, tour guides, hotel personnel, and travel agents. I also worked with bilingual sections in the textile and chemistry departments.
One of Fulbright’s central tenants is to foster cultural exchange and mutual understanding between nations. This is achieved through the placement of teaching assistants in local schools who carry out lessons that strive to create space for these important dialogues. That being said, it is also of upmost importance that teaching assistants engage themselves in learning about their local community and country as a whole. Here is some of the necessary background information I learned this year, and is helpful for viewing the subsequent language project described on this blog:
Galicia– One of 17 autonomous communities of Spain, located in the northwest corner above Portugal.
When I applied to Fulbright Spain back in September 2017, I outlined in my application why I wanted to live and teach in Galicia specifically. What drew me to this region of Spain was the existence of two co-official languages in the region, that being Gallego (Galician) and Spanish. The status of ‘co-official’ indicates that the regional government, the Xunta de Galicia, officially recognizes both languages and also recognizes that everyone has the right to know and use both of them in everyday life. This is all outlined in the 1981 Galician Statute of Autonomy.
I also wanted to go to Galicia because I had heard about their plurilingual education system (Galician/Spanish/English), and having an interest in bilingual education, I believed it would be extremely valuable to learn more about how an autonomous region was achieving this multilingualism.
“The Galician language belongs to the family of the Romanic languages that includes French or Catalan, and it is the result of the evolution of Latin, which was introduced by the Romans in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula. From the late 8th century, the language spoken in this area was so different from Latin that it can be considered a different language”
(www.lingua.gal)
The early records of Galician language date back to the 8th century, and from that moment onwards the language has faced several different phases of status and use. After the middle ages, Galician faced three centuries between 16th-18th of what’s been called Séculos Escuros, or Dark Centuries. They’re considered the dark centuries because there was a a lack of written Galician.
Following this era, “at the start of the 20th century, Galician was still the oral language of the main part of the population but, since the second half of the 19th century, Castilian was gaining prestige among urban bourgeoisie at the expense of Galician” (www.lingua.gal).
While advances were increasing in the 19th and early 20th century, there was a large disruption to Galician language progress when the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent Franco regime took over in the 20th century. Galician, as well as other regional languages in Spain such as Catalan in Catalonia and Euskera in the Basque Country, were suppressed as Spanish was declared the only official language of Spain under Franco’s nationalistic aim. Although Galician was suppressed in several ways during Franco’s regime, particularly through education, it’s important to realize that a shift from Galician to Spanish dominance was already occurring prior to Franco due to urbanization and the movement from rural towns to cities.
Through this extremely brief timeline, one can begin to get a feeling for the complex sociolinguistic factors that play into the use and maintenance of Galician today. And trust me, there are a lot of factors at play, too many to summarize here.
Today, Galician language use is widely studied, and we can see that “almost three quarters of the population in Galicia speaks Galician to a greater or lesser extent. This means that more than two million of speakers use the native language of Galicia in their everyday life” (www.lingua.gal). These figures come from the 2013 Survey on Household Living Conditions which was performed by the Galician Institute of Statistics.
The IGE (Instituto Galego de Estatistica / Galician Institute of Statistics) reports that “it seems evident the drop of Galician speakers, particularly among the younger. The best reason to explain this fact is the existence of a problem of intergenerational language transmission” (www.lingua.gal). The IGE maintains that there are still strengths reflected in the language data if viewed from an objective analysis, explaining:
- “Three quarters of the population in Galicia speaks Galician to a greater or lesser extent, an unusual fact in minority language communities
- The largest decreases of Galician speakers are found among those people who had not the benefit of an appropriate schooling in Galician (those born before 1973)
- It increased considerably the number of bilingual people (Galician-Castilian) and their bilingual uses.
- The use of the language grew at school during the last ten years; in the relationship among pupils, between pupils and teachers and these latter and their parents” (www.lingua.gal).
All of that being said, members of the Galician community maintain varying perspectives on the matter. These perspectives began popping up during my conversations with teachers, students, and community members. The issue at hand began to appear very nuanced, with no simple answer or explanation, and no single opinion on the matter.
I decided I wanted to investigate Galician language use a little bit closer through the means of our English classroom. The following posts will further describe the project I embarked on to understand how students at CIFP Manuel Antonio use and live through language!
All information on this page has been sourced from www.lingua.gal
More on the following:
Living Language Learning 