Immigration and school in multilingual contexts. The case of Catalonia and Andorra

Abstract

The social changes in recent years have particularly affected Catalonia and Andorra. Both contexts, despite sharing the same interest in consolidating Catalan, manage differently the role of this language at education and institutional levels. Whereas in Catalonia, Catalan shares official status with Castilian, Andorra is the only country in the world where it is the official language. Anyway, both the geographical proximity to Spain and France, and the continuous migratory movements have led to the present reality in which this language coexists with Castilian, French and Portuguese. Specifically, official data from the Government of Andorra reveals that more than half of the population is of foreign origin, figures which correlate with the number of immigrant students. Similarly, Catalonia is the Spanish Autonomous Community with the highest number of immigrants, a fact that is highly reflected linguistically and culturally in schools, just as in the case of Andorra. These two territories also share the peculiarity of relying on education systems where besides Catalan, other vehicular languages ??are present. In this sense, while Catalonia promotes the bilingual education Catalan-Castilian, there are schools in Andorra which belong to three different educational systems: French, Spanish and Andorran, where the main language of instruction is the corresponding official language of each country. Within this background frame, to the extent to which students’ language attitudes are significant for language learning and self-identifications, this communication contextualized the social and educational realities of Catalonia and Andorra, two contexts where various studies focused on the analysis of the language attitudes of native and immigrant students were developed.