Introduction
The following research work was undertaken in the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country (CAPVEAE),
a bilingual community with two official languages, the minority one being Basque and the majority Spanish.
In this country, bilingualism was established in school education in 1983, introducing the following models of
language learning: Model A (where the vehicle language is largely Spanish); Model B (Basque and Spanish are the
languages of instruction – approximately 50% each); Model Di (where most teaching is through Basque). Currently,
in primary education, the pupils opt for Model D (65.5%) as the most common choice, followed by Model B (27%),
Model A (6.72%) and Model X (0.72%) (pupil being exempt from Basque) (Eustat, the Basque Government
Statistics Office, 2011).
Given the arrival of immigrants from outside the CAPV-EAE over the past decade, the school has taken in pupils
of a great variety of origin. Currently, 6.9% of the pupil intake is from immigrant families (Ikuspegiak, 2011), the
majority of these being from South America (40.9%), North Africa (20.4%) and the European Union (20.4%).
Basque schools find themselves with the need to provide a suitable response to this diversity in the classroom.