Training teachers for the challenges of multilingual education

This chapter focuses on how trainee teachers are prepared to face the linguistic complexity they will encounter in classrooms in the Basque Autonomous Community (henceforth BAC) in Spain. Although Spanish is the home language for most children in the BAC, the overwhelming majority of parents choose Basque as language of instruction at pre-school and primary levels (Basque government 2018) independently of the language spoken at home, which means that Basque is mainly acquired through immersion programmes. The teacher training programme at Mondragon University aims at providing future pre-school and primary teachers with solid knowledge on language acquisition in bi/multilingual contexts. These future teachers are also made familiar with instruments for measuring children’s language development and, furthermore, they carry out a team-work project to be presented in English, containing data on children’s linguistic picture as well as reflections on their own linguistic skills and the utility of knowledge acquired for their future in multilingual education.