A critical sociolinguistic history of English language education in late 20th century Catalonia

The goal of this project (HistEnCat) is to investigate the sociolinguistic history of English language education in Catalonia from 1975 to 1999. The project examines the educational transition period (Barbero, 1995), during which English replaced French as the main foreign language in Catalan schooling, and a second period spanning the 1990s, defined by the strengthening and expansion of the teaching of English culminating in the first-wave of CLIL-oriented initiatives in Catalonia (Navés and Victori, 2010). This is a necessary undertaking given the paucity of available research on ELT in Spain and at a European level (Smith, 2016). Scientifically, it responds to recent calls for the need to historicise research in applied linguistics (Kramsch, 2015) and localise histories of language education (Howatt and Smith, 2014) in specific sociopolitical, economic, cultural and ideological contexts. Anchored in critical sociolinguistics, HistEnCat proposes an ethnography of the past (Costa et al., 2024, p. 43) that combines archival research, actors discursive memories through oral history interviews, and the continuities/dissonances between different types of historical discursive data. This project departs from the main hypothesis that by examining the evolution of the field of English language teaching/learning in Spain and more specifically in Catalonia, we will come to an empirical understanding of how a collective imaginary of lagging behind and "inability" in English (Codó & Sunyol, 2024a) was established. Drawing on the findings of our previous research projects, we have identified five interlocking discursive fields defined by unequal power relations in which capitals are produced and distributed and where participants discursively struggle for legitimacy and authority. These include (1) the legal framework in Europe, Spain and Catalonia, (2) language educators memories and trajectories in both the private and public sectors with a comparison between three geographical areas (Barcelona metropolitan area, Lleida and Vic), (3) the expanding ELT textbook industry and the articulation between teaching materials and methodologies, (4) initial and lifelong teacher training actors, infrastructure and ideologies, and (5) European projects and conferences on foreign language teaching and educational mobility programmes. In addition to a more traditional top-down approach to normative texts and institutional voices, we seek to contribute to the history of language teaching from below (McLelland, 2017, p.2) by including interviews not only with key social actors, such as teachers and teacher trainers at all educational levels, but also teaching and cultural associations as well as publishing houses. Researching the past is not only a way of comprehending the present; it is also a tool for reimagining the future (Heller & McElhinny, 2017). Understanding the past to better understand our current challenges linked to the English craze in Catalonia will foreground the inequalities in terms of access to the English language as a socially and economically valued language across social class, types of school, geographical area and historical period.