2. Languages in primary school playgrounds

2.1.The school and usage project

The School and Usage project began with the intention of analysing the impact of the use of Catalan as the vehicular language for teaching on language use by pupils who were finishing primary education. The study, the fieldwork for which was done at the end of the '90s, collected declared, observed and experimental data in 52 schools throughout Catalonia, except for the Vall d'Aran, which was left out because of its specific linguistic characteristics.

The selection of the 52 schools followed three criteria. Firstly, 5 categories of school were differentiated according to the environmental linguistic conditions, or the declared knowledge of Catalan in the area where the school was located according to the last available language census, which amounts to the same thing (table 1).

TAULA 1. Condició lingüística ambiental

And, finally, whether the schools taught entirely or almost entirely in Catalan or taught some lessons in Catalan and some in Spanish was taken into account (table 3).

TABLE 2. Linguistic situation in teaching

Meanwhile, the schools were classified into three groups depending on the demo-linguistic composition of the group of pupils there; that is, the percentage of Catalan- and Spanish-speakers attending the school (table 2).

TAULA 3. Condició lingüística del centre

The combination of these three categories gave rise to 30 possible types of school. The final sample included 14 types, as some combinations were very difficult to find for operational and budgetary reasons. This is why it cannot be considered a representative sample in statistical terms, and the results must be read simply as broad trends among the school population in the 6th year of primary school.

Three types of data were collected at the 52 schools: in the first place, declared data on the language used by pupils to relate to their families and their social networks, through the administration of questionnaires; secondly, observed data through the recording of children's conversations in unmonitored situations at break times and, finally, experimental data on oral knowledge of Catalan and Spanish, with the SEDEC's standard tests for assessing linguistic competences.

The data from declared and experimental sources was tabulated. The recordings were digitalised using the SoundForge sound treatment program and they were transcribed following the transcription criteria of the Department of Catalan Philology at the University of Barcelona. All the materials were analysed using the SPSS statistical processing program, based on qualitative and quantitative techniques and, among other variables, those included in table 4 were taken into account.

TABLE 4. Variables taken into account in the analysis

2.2.Linguistic choices at break time

When it came to doing the fieldwork for this study, the two languages heard most during break times in the 52 schools analysed as a whole were Catalan and Spanish, in quite unequal proportions: while slightly over a third of the recorded speaking turns were in Catalan, almost two thirds were in Spanish, and only 1.6% showed alternating languages (graph 1). The presence of other languages must be considered as isolated occurrences (0.2%). In the body of data collected, children use English and French to sing, Arabic to play a language game and German to read a short text in that language (table 5).(3)