Panorama de la enseñanza de lenguas extranjeras en la España moderna

This chapter tries to summarize the trends that have shaped the teaching of foreign languages and teacher training in modern Spain. This theme will be developed alongside another: the idea of Europe, the meaning of its project and its membership. The connection between these two ideas is not coincidental. As defended by Madrid (2001), since the educational reform of 1990 the foreign language education and teacher education in Spain decidedly embraced the European project, to which Spain had been gradually and irreversibly orbiting since Adolfo Suarez requested access to the European Economic Community in 1977, something which would arrive eight years later. Since then, the incorporation of the peseta into the Foreign Exchange System of the European Monetary System in 1989, and Spain’s adhesion in 1991 to the Schengen Agreement for a "Europe without borders" —which some countries around us want to review today—, and finally its support to the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, prepared the political, legal and socio-economic context in which the teaching of foreign languages in Spain and in the rest of Europe began to be conceived. Foreign language education justified itself in relation to the construction of a fair, plural, tolerant, and multilingual Europe, respectful of the rights of its social majorities and cultural minorities. In fact, it was during the first nineties that Spain, France, Greece, Italy, and the United Kingdom implemented the foreign language as a compulsory subject in primary education.