IES Berenguer Dalmau is a school in the town of Catarroja, in Valencia, Spain. The teaching staff is composed by 103 teachers and there are 1015 students, who can study Compulsory Secondary Education, A Levels and different Professional Training and Higher Education programmes.
We have two cooficial languages (Castilian Spanish and Valencian), which makes most of our students bilingual from an early age. Apart from English we also teach French. We will also introduce German in the near future. When the students start a new language the teachers have to vary the teaching methods more since the students don’t have so many words to use, and they also demand a lower level from them. Teachers at our school want to exchange good language teaching ideas to vary our lessons with colleagues from Sweden, Estonia and The Czech Republic. Teachers need to develop their ICT skills and use ICT in teaching, so that teachers and students feel confident in using ICT and teach/learn better. Therefore both students and teachers need to improve their ICT skills – teachers in teaching and students in learning. As we have two cooficial languages and most of our students are bilingual from an early age they have a good command of both languages and it enables our students to learn a third and even a fourth language more easily. We are used to changing from one language to the other constantly, so we find it natural to speak a new language. This is one of the aspects where we, both students and key people in the staff group, can contribute to the project – we can make the students from the other countries aware of the fact that learning a new language gets easier the more langauages you learn and thus they get more motivated to study languages. The key people are the language teachers and the Head Teacher. The people in charge of the project in Catarroja are the English teacher Jordi Parra and the legal representative Ricard Campos Benlloch. If one of them leaves, the other will continue together with another teacher. There will be 7 teachers and around 60 students involved in the project.
The Spanish school system: https://www.scholaro.com/db/Countries/Spain/Education-System
