English loses ground in Spanish classrooms as bilingual model falters

English loses ground in classrooms and bilingualism cracks

In any public school, a twelve-year-old boy attends Natural Science class in English. He doesn't understand half of what the teacher says. He doesn't fully understand the subject in Spanish either, because he's never taken it in his own language. At the end of the year, he fails both. That is the diagnosis repeated in the articles that open the debate: the bilingual sections model, that invention that promised a country of polyglots without moving a finger from the desk, is beginning to be questioned by parents and teachers. The promoter of one of those complaints is also an English teacher. When the person teaching the subject is the first to doubt it, something has broken.

What exactly is being discussed

It's not about eliminating English from the curriculum. That should be said before someone runs to burn down the British Council. What's on the table is something more specific: stopping teaching subjects like Science, History or Physical Education in a foreign language. The difference is important. One thing is having an English subject, with its grammar and vocabulary, and quite another is using that English as a vehicle to teach content that the student doesn't master even in their own language.

The most repeated argument is that of the double failure. The student doesn't learn the subject because the language blocks access to the content, and doesn't learn the language because the content distracts from grammar. Result: neither one thing nor the other. In Germany, according to the cited articles, some schools were already considering eliminating English in primary school, and not precisely for lack of resources, but because they saw no substantial differences between starting at eight years old or starting later. In China, a prestigious university has eliminated the English requirement for graduation, a move that some interpret as a nationalist turn and others as a simple acknowledgment that the exam didn't measure anything useful.

Teachers: the link nobody wants to look at

There is a problem that is mentioned in passing but explains much of the failure: who teaches the class. In public schools, the English teacher is a graduate in English Philology who has passed a competitive exam. They know grammar, literature, theory. But when it comes to speaking it, the level can be mediocre. It's not a personal accusation, it's a consequence of the system: the exam doesn't evaluate oral fluency, it evaluates the syllabus. And then there's the opposite case: the native speaker without pedagogical training who ends up in a classroom because their accent is nice. A native speaker without method doesn't teach better than a Spaniard with method. The accent is the least of it until the level is high.

The comparison with other European countries is inevitable. In Switzerland, Belgium or the Netherlands, people speak three languages with a naturalness that here sounds like science fiction. But there a factor comes into play that isn't taught in school: exposure. In those countries, television isn't dubbed. Children grow up hearing English, German and French on TV, in the street, on the internet. In Spain, dubbing covers everything. And not only dubbing into Spanish: also into Catalan, Galician and Basque. The dubbing industry is a business, and like any business, it has its closed doors and its well-placed families.

Language immersion: the Basque case

The debate drifts into a topic that in Spain is always raw: immersion models in co-official languages. A participant provides a piece of data that, if true, is devastating: in the Basque model where everything is in Basque except the Spanish subject, only 15% of students finished with correct competencies in both languages. More than half had correct competencies only in Spanish, despite most subjects being taught in Basque. And an additional 15% did not achieve correct competencies in either. That is, the model failed in 85% of cases. The data is not independently verified, but it circulates strongly in the debate and explains why more and more people look suspiciously at any mandatory immersion experiment.

AI and translation: the argument that changes everything

And then there's technology. Someone has already tried it: record a speech in Spanish, run it through an AI that clones the voice and translates into Portuguese, Japanese or German, and have a native speaker of those languages say it sounds like a native. The experiment is not science fiction, it's a tool that already exists. If a gadget translates for you in real time and with your own voice, why study languages? The question is tricky. Because the gadget depends on battery, connection and not failing. And if it fails in a negotiation, a medical emergency or a job interview, the embarrassment can be monumental. But the temptation to delegate to the machine is real, especially in a country where English has been taught badly for decades.

What nobody disputes: exposure rules

Almost all positions agree on something: the classroom is not enough. You can study English for ten years and leave without knowing how to order a coffee. You can learn in six months by reading children's novels with a dictionary and a spaced repetition app. Grammar is learned unconsciously after listening to the language thousands of times; university grammar serves to pass exams, not to communicate. Musicians and imitators learn languages more easily because they have a trained ear and have lost the antiestéticar of ridicule. The rest need practice, exposure and real necessity. And in Spain, the real need to speak English arrives late, badly and at the stroke of a résumé.

The closing is given by a disconcerting fact: in Switzerland it's normal for someone to speak six languages. In Spain, someone speaking two is already considered an achievement. It's not genetics. It's television without dubbing, it's zero shame and it's starting earlier. Or not starting, depending on which way the political wind blows.