APINGLO-CLM is a R+D project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and hosted at the Department of Modern Philology (English Studies) at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM).

It is part of the coordinated R+D project entitled Multilingual education in the global era: Markets, desire, practices and identities among Spanish adolescents in two autonomous communities (MUEDGE) which aims to compare the processes and practices of the appropriation of English as a global language in Castilla-La Mancha and Catalonia. The Catalonia team is grouped under the APINGLO-CAT project led by Dr Eva Codó, Department of English & German, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

The two autonomous communities are characterized by different linguistic contexts (official bilingualism in the case of Catalonia and socially constructed monolingualism in the case of Castilla-La Mancha) as well as differing demographic, socioeconomic and sociocultural circumstances. The main goal of the project is to gain a wider, deeper and more complexifying understanding of the different linguistic, social and educational ideologies linked to the learning and use of English in Spain in the current context of multiple and profound technological, cultural and social transformations.

OUR RESEARCH APPROACH

We follow the principles of qualitative, critical and ethnographic sociolinguistics, although our team is made up of researchers who come from and work within different theoretical/methodological approaches.

THE GOALS OF APINGLO-CLM

Our project investigates the different types of multi/bilingual education implemented at public and semi-private secondary schools in Castilla-La Mancha.

Broadly speaking, the scientific goals of APINGLO-CLM can be summarized as follows:

GOAL 1. To ethnographically study the implementation of different forms of multi/bilingual education Castilla-La Mancha in order to understand:

1. what ideologies underlie such programmes;
2. what their educational/linguistic/citizenship goals are;
3. how different stakeholders (parents, teachers, students, administrators and policy makers) position themselves with respect to them;
4. how they are linked to globalization processes, and socio-political, economic transformations in Castilla-La Mancha (e.g. what processes of social structuration can be observed).

GOAL 2. Comprehend the meanings and values currently associated to English in Castilla-La Mancha from a multilingual perspective, which takes into account not only other socially-valued foreign languages (French, German, Mandarin, etc.), but also students’ first language(s) and the languages of migration.

GOAL 3. Describe communicative practices inside and outside the multilingual classroom, and understand the role and function of the different languages at play.

GOAL 4. Compare the results of the above-mentioned aims in Castilla-La Mancha with the findings in Catalonia.