Learning Through the Minority: An Introduction to the Use of Basque in Education in the Basque Country

Jasone Cenoz Department of Research Methods in Education, University of the Basque Country, FICE, Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain doi: 10.2167/lcc338.0

The Basque Country covers an area of approximately 20,742 square kilometres along the Bay of Biscay north and south of the Pyrenees and comprises seven provinces (Figure 1). Three of these provinces belong to the French department 'Pyrénées Atlantiques' (Lapurdi, Benafarroa and Zuberoa), and four to two autonomous regions in Spain: the Basque Autonomous Community and Navarre (Nafarroa). The Basque Autonomous Community (BAC henceforth) has three provinces: Bizkaia, Gipuzkoa and Araba.

This special issue of Language, Culture and Curriculum, Teaching Through Basque: Achievements and Challenges, looks at different aspects of Basque-medium education in the southern part of the Basque Country, that is in the BAC and Navarre. A description of education in the three Northern Basque provinces can be found in Stuijt et al. (1998).

The total Basque population is approximately 3 million, 91% being Spanish citizens. The BAC is the most highly populated area with 73% of the total population, 18% living in Navarre and 9% in the Northern Basque Country.

The distribution of the Basque speaking population varies considerably from region to region. Table 1 includes the percentages of bilinguals, passive bilinguals and monolinguals in the BAC, Navarre and the Northern Basque Country according to the 2001 Survey (Basque Government, 2003). Bilinguals can speak Basque and either Spanish (in the BAC and Navarre) or French (in the Northern Basque Country). Passive bilinguals have receptive skills in Basque (oral comprehension and in many cases reading comprehension) but not productive skills (speaking and writing). Monolinguals can only speak the majority language, Spanish or French. There are practically no Basque monolinguals.

The proportion of people who are proficient in Basque has increased in recent years in the three BAC provinces due to the educational system. The percentage of the population that speaks Basque is quite stable in Navarre but is in decline in the Northern Basque Country most likely due to the lack of institutional support.

Basque is a non-Indoeuropean language and is the oldest language in Western Europe. It is a minority language which has survived in contact with its powerful neighbours: French and Spanish. In the Southern Basque Country, the dominance of Spanish increased in the 20th century due to industrialisation which attracted an important number of Spanish speaking immigrants from different areas in Spain. Another factor contributing to the weakening of Basque was its exclusion from the public domain including education during Franco's dictatorship (1939–1975).

The Spanish Constitution (1978) declared Spanish the nationwide official language and guaranteed the rights of Spanish speakers to use their language but also raised the possibility of recognising other languages as co-official in their own territories. Nowadays, Basque has a co-official status in the BAC and the northern area of Navarre.

A lot of effort has been made in recent decades to reverse language shift, that is to try to stop the decline of Basque and to promote its knowledge and use in different domains (see also Azurmendi & Martinez de Luna, 2005, 2006; Fishman, 1991). In this volume we will focus on one of these domains, education in the BAC and Navarre.

The educational system in these two autonomous communities is basically the same regarding the general curriculum and educational levels but, as we will see in the papers by Zalbide and Cenoz, and Oroz and Sotés, differs somewhat in the amount of Basque used. The levels of the educational system (excluding the university level which is not dealt with in this volume) are as shown in Table 2.

One of the characteristics of the educational system is that children go to school at a very early age. Even though compulsory education does not start until the age of six, practically all children go to school at the age or three and in many cases even at the age of two. It is also very common to take children to day care before this age. The activities and classes in pre-primary are adapted for the children's age but the classrooms are located within the school premises and the timetables are quite similar to primary school. Non-compulsory education between 16 and 18 can either be aimed at students who are going to University or vocational training. Higher level professional training is also possible at the end of secondary school.

This special issue of Language, Culture and Curriculum focuses on research in education in the Basque Country where Basque, a minority language, is in many cases the language of instruction for some or all the school subjects. The volume provides background information about the Basque educational system; about academic and linguistic results related to the use of the minority as the language of instruction and the challenges and problems the Basque educational system is currently facing. The volume focuses on research conducted in the Basque Country that can be useful for other bilingual and multilingual contexts involving different language combinations (see also Cenoz, forthcoming).

Most papers are research oriented and based on research studies conducted in the Basque Autonomous Community and Navarre, the southern part of the Basque Country. The papers in this special issue look at the achievements of the last 25 years but also discuss the challenges the Basque educational system is facing nowadays.

The first two papers discuss different aspects of bilingual and multilingual education in the Basque Autonomous Community (BAC) and Navarre. Zalbide and Cenoz in Bilingual Education in the Basque Autonomous Community: Achievements and Challenges summarise the changes that have taken place in the educational system of the BAC in the last 25 years. They discuss the dramatic increase of the use of Basque as the language of instruction and its consequences for teacher training and material development but also look at current and future challenges. In the next paper, Bilingual Education in Navarre: Achievements and Challenges, Oroz and Sotés look at the situation in Navarre which is divided into three areas regarding the use of Basque in education. They also discuss the increasing importance of English and the new challenge of immigration in recent years.

The next two papers focus on the outcomes of bilingual education and the use of Basque as the language of instruction in the BAC. In Assessment of the Bilingual Education in the Basque Country, Sierra summarises the results of several national and international evaluations (PISA, etc) and discusses data comparing results in bilingual and monolingual models. These evaluations also provide interesting information about the overall educational system in the BAC compared to other Autonomous Communities in Spain and other countries. In A Longitudinal Study of Academic Achievement in Spanish: The Effect of Linguistic Models Santiago, Lukas, Joaristi, Lizasoain and Moyano report the results of a longitudinal study on Spanish reading skills. They analyse the effect of some individual and contextual factors (gender, socioeconomic status (SES), school network, metacognitive skills, etc.) and the effect of using Basque or Spanish as the language of instruction on reading skills in Spanish.

Schools are not isolated from the context in which they are placed and Basque schools are facing challenges related to the minority status of Basque, the increasing arrival of immigrants and the spread of English as a language of international communication. These challenges are discussed in the last three papers of the volume. Martínez de Luna and Suberbiola's paper Measuring Student Language Use in the School Context reports a research study on one of the main challenges of Basque and other minority languages in education, the active use of Basque by students and the variables predicting this use. In Basque, Spanish and Immigrant Minority Languages in Basque Schools Etxeberria and Elosegi examine the new situation created by the most recent waves of immigrants from different countries. They provide data about these immigrants and discusses the difficulties they face in education. In Promoting the Minority Language Through Integrated Plurilingual Language Planning: The Case of Ikastolas, Elorza and Muñoa discuss a special programme that goes from bilingual to multilingual education by integrating the use of English in the curriculum. The programme has different goals for the different languages and its results indicate that it is possible to combine the use of Basque as the main language of instruction with the learning of other languages.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editor of Language, Culture and Curriculum, Eoghan Mac Aogáin for his support in the editing of this volume. I would also like to thank him and the reviewers for their helpful comments on the papers included in this special issue.

Bilingual Education in the Basque Autonomous Community: Achievements and Challenges

Mikel Zalbide Department of Education, Universities and Research, Basque Government, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain

Jasone Cenoz Department of Research Methods in Education, University of the Basque Country, FICE, Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain

This paper focuses on the situation of Basque in education in the Basque Autonomous Community. First, it provides statistical information about four crucial aspects of bilingual education: (1) Parental choice regarding the linguistic model, that is, the use of Basque, Spanish or both Basque and Spanish as languages of instruction over the last 20 years; (2) teachers' proficiency in Basque and the special programmes for teachers to learn Basque; (3) teaching and learning materials including audiovisual and software materials; (4) promotion of the use of Basque at school including some special projects. The second part of the paper compares the situation and challenges Basque was facing in the 1970s before Basque became an official language and nowadays. This comparison shows that even though there have been important achievements regarding the use of Basque as the language of instruction and the number of Basque-speaking teachers at school, Basque continues to be a 'small' language. In the last part of the paper the possible ways to overcome current and future challenges are discussed.

doi: 10.2167/lcc339.0

Keywords: Basque, bilingualism, bilingual education, Basque Autonomous Community

Introduction

The Basque Autonomous Community (BAC) has three provinces (Araba, Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa) and it is the most highly populated area in the whole of the Basque Country with 73% of the total population, approximately two million inhabitants. The capital cities are Bilbo-Bilbao, Donostia-San Sebastian and Vitoria-Gasteiz which is the administrative capital of the BAC.

The majority language of the BAC is Spanish. It lives side by side with Basque which is a minority language in its own territory. Both languages have an official status in the BAC. According to the Spanish Constitution (1978) all Spanish citizens have the duty to know Spanish and the right to use it. Other languages are equally official in their Autonomous Communities. The BAC Statute of Autonomy (1979) affirms that Basque has, like Spanish, the status of an official language in the BAC and that citizens have the right to know and use both languages.

English is becoming increasingly important for Basque citizens as a language of international communication and its role in Basque schools is becoming more prominent in recent years (see also Cenoz, 2005, forthcoming). However, English is not used as a language of everyday communication in the BAC and is actually a foreign language. As in many other areas in Europe, it is a third language but communicative competence in English is not as high in the BAC as in many other European countries (Cenoz & Jessner, 2000). Nowadays most school children start learning English at the age of four, in kindergarten. French used to be more popular in the past but nowadays it is an optional fourth language. An important new development in the Basque educational system is the increasing number of immigrants (see Etxeberria, this volume)

This overview is based on the general situation of primary and secondary education in the Basque Autonomous Community (BAC) excluding university studies.

Sociolinguistic Situation

Basque and Spanish have been in contact in the BAC for centuries and there was a long established pattern of diglossic use between them, although it is changing rapidly in recent times (see Cenoz, in press; Zuazo, 1995). Basque was the language of everyday use in all or most of the informal, orally- conducted spheres of life for the bulk of the population. Spanish (or some previous Romance language or variety) was the language of formality, the literacy-related language of power, academic life and of the high-status interaction networks. Traditionally, schooling was primarily in Spanish, although one of its basic components, religious formation, was bilingual in its written form and, at least initially, fully or predominantly Basque on the spoken plane. But that diglossic pattern has weakened substantially due to many factors such as industrial revolution and urbanisation, transportation and universal education, non-Basque speaking immigration or language policy pursuing a monolingual state. The situation in the BAC could be best described as fragmentary bilingualism with residual diglossia in the Basque speaking districts of the BAC. Spanish has reached into the home in most areas. Basque, on the other hand, has begun to appear on signs in the street, in schools and in the local press but never so far as to take away Spanish's primary role from it, except at school.

Most present-day inhabitants of the Basque Country cannot speak Basque. According to the most recent sociolinguistic survey conducted by the Basque Government, (Aizpurua Tellería & Aizpurua Espín, 2005; Basque Government, 2003) 29.4% of the population in the BAC is bilingual (Basque-Spanish), and 11.4% is passive bilingual, that is they can understand Basque but have limited production skills. Monolinguals in Spanish are 59.2% of the population. According to the same survey, the proportion of people who are proficient in Basque has increased in the three BAC provinces and in 2001 there were 110,000 more bilinguals than in 1991. The number of Basque speakers has risen from 419,200 to 530,900 since 1991. The main increase has taken place in the 16–24 age group, from 25% of Basque speakers in 1991 to 48% in 2001. The effect of Basque-medium education is clear here. Even though these figures are encouraging, the level of command of Basque by those who claim to be Basque speakers varies greatly, with receptive skills being clearly stronger than productive ones, and oral skills normally stronger than those that are literacy-related. Many of the new bilinguals are Spanish-dominant bilinguals who are speakers of Basque as a second language and have learned Basque at school. These speakers do not often speak Basque at home but sometimes they speak Basque with their friends. The bilingual population is estimated to be 28.2% Basque-dominant, 26.8% balanced, and 45% Spanish-dominant (Basque Government, 2003). This means that almost half of the speakers of Basque find it easier to use Spanish than Basque.

This situation is reflected in the use of the language. Some studies have observed the languages people speak on the street (Altuna, 2002a). Four studies of street measurements have been carried out since 1989 and altogether over one million people have been observed. The results indicate that there has been a slight increase in the use of Basque in Gipuzkoa and Bizkaia but not in Araba (Altuna, 2002b). The percentage of people using Basque on the street in Gipuzkoa has gone up from 23.3% in 1989 to 29.9% in 2001. In Bizkaia it has gone up from 8.1% to 11% but in Alava it has gone down from 3.9% to 3.3%. These figures indicate that in spite of the higher number of speakers who are proficient, Basque is still a language at risk.

Bilingual Education

Legal background

Compulsory education in the Basque Autonomous Community includes six years of primary (6 to 12-year-old children) and four years of secondary school (12 to 16-year-old children). Most children go to school from the age of two or three and many attend day-care centres from an earlier age. Non-compusory secondary education goes from 16 to 18. There are state and private schools and each type accounts for approximately 50% of the total number of students. Private schools are in many cases Catholic schools but some non-religious schools are also private.