2.4 My experience as a professor in an institute with immigrants  (Page 6/8)

Bilingualism is usually associated with educational centers where students at a high social and cultural level or children of civil or industrialist foreigners predominate. It is up to public education, therefore, to adequately supply the necessities of immigrants or assimilated foreigners. The method used to build bilingualism in public school is the same as it would be in any country. The maternal language, as well as other transversal aspects of their culture is used as support at the time of approaching an official curriculum so as not to incur a total loss of the immigrant student’s native culture (Smith, 2001). Many immigrants, after being registered in Morocco during a great part of their scholastic life, forget most of their knowledge after remaining in Spain for a long period of time. Some come to the point of not knowing how to write in either Arabic or Spanish. This is the reality: they are caught in two cultures without dominating either one.

The method just proposed to produce bilingualism would be an educative offer allowing students to be in agreement with what the labor or international markets demand, at the same time it would allow them to not to be distanced from their maternal language. Schooling centers must believe in this point in order to professionally qualify the students. An example would be in Extremadura, in the Gabinete de Iniciativas Transfronterizas , where they demand technicians and professionals to work in the neighboring country; the fact is that there are few centers that supply this language.

Bilingualism has been studied and defended by authors like Duverger, Smith, Vygostky, Kaplan, Ferreiro, García Mínguez, and Manuela Caballero. The latter has recently presented a doctoral thesis that approaches the direct relation between the skills that contribute to a student to continue studying the maternal language outside their country in coexistence with the new language, and how a mutual transference of knowledge takes place. The study focuses on two Extremadura centers and two of the Swiss divisions of Vaud. The author reaches the conclusion that the scholastic success of the students who arrive to a foreign country between 7 and 18 years of age depend upon the formation which they receive in their language of origin, although it remains in the background. According to the investigation, it is very positive for these students to maintain contact with the maternal language, mainly for the benefit that contributes to their acquisition of knowledge and improvement of the other language. This study shows the necessity to enhance the socio-cultural knowledge of the students, and to make sure that our professors are aware of the "new didactics of the emigration” (Noticias Universitarias, 2004).

Starting from the unknown, we bring socio-cultural knowledge to light. It is definitively the best way to understand others; it makes cultural interaction in itself educational. Although this method adapts to educational centers with a major foreign population, the problem can arise when there is a multiplicity of nationalities registered in the same center with different cultures. In this case, multiculturalism is a necessary tool to integrate diversities around a dominant culture.