Biodata

Arturo Márquez teaches in the areas of Spanish and English languages. He has a degree in Translation and Interpreting for the University of Salamanca (2014), and he studied the two first years of German Studies, with Arabic and Portuguese as complementary languages. Afterwards, he studied the Master’s Degree in Secondary Education and Baccalaureate, Vocational Training and Language Teaching at the Pablo de Olavide University and taught English, French and Spanish and literature in Compulsory Secondary Education in several centers. His professional experience also includes the areas of foreign language teaching, translation, text review, project coordination and collaborations with journals and travel guides in several languages. He is currently a lecturer at the University of Nebrija, where he teaches subjects in both the Bachelor’s Degree in Education and the Master’s Degree in Teacher Training and is responsible for the subject Teaching and Language Learning II. He has always fought for the elimination of language barriers and is convinced that education is the first step towards achieving his goal.

Bilingual Education in Spanish Schools: Is All that Glitters Gold?

The widespread need and desire for raising our children in a bilingual environment in the Spanish education system have called for new methodologies and teaching techniques whose efficiency is constantly called into question. Having our primary and secondary education students learn contents in English might not be as productive as it appears to be, especially if the figure of the teacher is not well trained in terms of foreign languages. There seems to be a lack of correspondence between the students’ –and their families’– expectations and the reality, for they centre their decisions on the schools’ reputation rather than on their own interests. As a matter of fact, this talk aims at giving prominence to the main factors that hinder the achievement of our students as well as envisioning the future of bilingual education in secondary education schools.