Many studies from diverse contexts have underscored that education can play a key role in promoting minority language revitalisation (for instance, O'Duibhir, 2018). Basque immersion programs are considered a good example of this, one of their prominent features being that they aim to reinforce students' multilingual competence including a minority language (Idiazabal et al. 2015). Basque immersion programs are increasingly evolving towards interlinguistic or language integrated approaches. This can be observed in curricular guidelines, teaching materials (Balza et al., 2021) and classroom practices (Leonet et al., 2017).
The goal of this paper is to show that a trilingual teaching sequence integrating activities in Basque, Spanish and English can effectively promote multilingual skills in Basque immersion settings. This research was carried out in a school located in a predominantly Spanish-speaking area of the Basque Autonomous Community. Basque is the medium of instruction in all educational levels of the school, except for language lessons in Spanish and English, and a few CLIL subjects in English. The participants of the study were 21 students aged 16, for whom Spanish was the dominant language of socialisation.
A teaching sequence was designed and implemented. It followed the principles of the integrated teaching of languages and translanguaging, Basque being the most used language throughout the sequence; it also adopted a genre-based approach where the ultimate goal of the teaching constituted the production of texts. Specifically, students were required to produce oral expository texts, where Basque, Spanish and English were combined. Texts produced by students at the beginning and at the end of the teaching sequence constituted the empirical data of this study.
The contrast between the initial and final texts showed an overall improvement of oral expository skills in the three languages. More specifically, students produced more explicit mentions of core elements at the introductory section of the text in Basque; they also used more accurate text genre-specific topic introducers, regardless of the language; and finally, they showed a more consistent use of rephrasing resources in English, to clarify some concepts referred to in their oral texts.
We conclude that a planned language alternation and an integration of languages within a genre-focused teaching sequence can constitute an effective didactic approach in order to promote students' multilingual competence in Basque immersion education.
References
Balza, I., Encinas Reguero, M. C., y Milla, R. (2021). La didáctica de la gramática desde el tratamiento integrado de lenguas en la CAPV: Análisis de materiales del proyecto EKI. Didacticae, 9, 139-156.
Idiazabal, I., Manterola, I. & Diaz de Gereñu, L. (2015). Objetivos y recursos didácticos para la educación plurilingüe. In I. Garcia-Azkoaga & I. Idiazabal (Eds), Para una ingeniería didáctica para la enseñanza plurilingüe. Bilbao: UPV/EHU. 37-59.
Leonet, O., Cenoz, J. & Gorter, D. (2017) Challenging Minority Language Isolation: Translanguaging in a Trilingual School in the Basque Country. Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 16:4, 216-227.
Ó Duibhir, P. (2018). Immersion education: Lessons from a minority language context. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
