The Minister of Education, Josep González-Cambrayhas defended this Monday, in his appearance before the Education Commission of the Parliament, the linguistic pact reached by the ERC, PSC and ‘comuns’ to renew the commitment to the linguistic immersion model and has underlined that it will mean strengthen the Catalan school. In this framework, he has pointed out that although Catalonia complies with what the Catalan Education Law (LEC) in the sense that at the end of the 4th year of ESO the students have full knowledge of Catalan and Spanish, the intention of the Department is to go one step further and ensure that that domain is also orally.
Thus, it has announced that the basic skills assessment tests that are made in 6th grade and in 4th of ESO will include oral language exams. “The language is protected by speaking it,” she has argued. This initiative is also part of the reports that indicate the decline in the use of Catalan in schools and that it is being the subject of various measures by the ‘conselleria’, such as a plan to promote Catalan that is already being carried out in 216 educational centers and that will reach all Catalan centers within a period of three years.
The Department has not specified when these oral exams will begin to be included in the basic skills tests or if it will be applied to all students or will be done progressively.
In the 2018-19 and 2019-20 academic years, Educació launched a pilot test in a sample of 1,500 4th ESO students from 51 centers educational they had to do oral exams in Catalan, Spanish and English.
The then secretary of Educational Policies Carles Martínez explained then that these oral expression tests had been introduced because “it is one of the most fragile skills because less work is done”. In 2019, Martínez already pointed out that “the will is to expand these tests and that they can be incorporated in a structural way”.
In this pilot test, the overall mean score of the students in oral expression in Catalan was 72.9 points, while in Spanish it was 73.7. In English language, the score was 65.7 points.