Contenidos teóricos para eI desarrollo de las competencias en multiculturalidad y plurilingüismo del profesorado de educación Primaria

Resumen

This paper describes the training experience carried out in the Valencian Community in collaboration with the teacher training centre for primary education in Orihuela and two schools in the northern part of the province of Alicante. The proposal responds to the training needs of teachers and guidance counsellors in the schools in terms of integrating and teaching Spanish to foreign pupils. The cultural and linguistic diversity of students in Spanish schools is currently a limitation for teachers in all the autonomous communities, although the percentages of these students vary from one to another. The Valencian Community has a considerable number of them, and teachers often do not know how to deal with the difficulties encountered by their students or how to help them. In our intervention, we offered a presentation of theoretical materials, especially from the European Union, and of Spanish as an additional language material, published by Spanish publishers, specifically focused on the Primary Education stage. The teachers were unfamiliar with both contents, and they had the opportunity to ask concrete questions about how to achieve the inclusion of children and their academic updating. In this paper we focus on the theoretical materials, which we believe should form part of the initial and in-service training of primary school teachers.