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Bilingual education currently faces the challenge of improving teacher training to meet the linguistic and didactic demands of a content and language integrated approach. Our paper analyses what Spanish in-service primary school teachers consider the key training priorities for their involvement in bilingual programmes. Using content data analysis, we have detected the most frequently used terms in the teachers' answers to an open-ended question. 2,830 words were examined, and the net of relations among the training priorities emerging from their discourse was established. Our results confirm that teachers prioritise the need to be proficient in English over methodological issues, which prevail once language proficiency has been achieved. They highlight investment as being crucial both to implement school bilingual programmes and to provide training opportunities for their professional development. Our study concludes that only concerted personal and administrative efforts will bridge the gap between global educational agendas and classroom performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bilingual education today pervades the microcosm of primary school settings across Europe, and has deserved the attention of policy makers and researchers. This paper aims at reporting on the perceptions of Spanish in-service primary teachers on four key areas of bilingual programs, namely, training priorities, teaching resources, school organization, and overall assessment of the initiative. We present qualitative data drawn from 97 teachers on the eight most frequently mentioned aspects of each area. Regarding training, teachers express the need for higher linguistic competence, greater investment in lifelong learning schemes, and further opportunities to contact with native speakers. As for resources, most teachers show a lack of enthusiasm with published coursebooks parallel to a growing confidence in their own materials. Teachers also claim that organizational improvements involve split groups and greater coordination. In spite of admitted difficulties, they highlight the fact that bilingual programs yield tangible outcomes such as children's improvement of their competence in English, parents' greater demand of schools with bilingual programs, and the deployment of more dynamic methodologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to report on a contrastive analysis between the perceptions of novice and expert teachers on four key dimensions of implementing CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) in primary and secondary schools in Spain. To this end, we applied a non-experimental research design with an ex-post-facto methodology using questionnaire studies. The instrument employed was an adaptation of a previous questionnaire, which was completed by 151 in-service teachers. From the data analysis, statistically significant differences were obtained in the criteria variables when they concerned the teaching experience in CLIL projects. Our data confirm that expert CLIL teachers prioritize methodological competencies and the ability to integrate language and content over subject knowledge and language proficiency, exhibit a more critical view of published course materials, value cooperation and innovation as integral components of CLIL teaching more highly than novice teachers and are more aware of the benefits of bilingual programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]