Introduction: from Catalan immersion to foreign language CLIL
In today's world, there are very few places where a person can spend an entire lifetime in contact with only one language. New digital technologies have brought us all into contact with songs, texts, films, political voices, and other cultural manifestations in a variety of languages, including some we may never have heard of. Learning languages becomes a way of both enlarging our understanding of the complex global world where we live, and of increasing our possibilities of entering other cultures and societies.
Catalonia is an autonomous community in Spain that projects its language as a vital part of its history and cultural identity. People live every day in at least two official languages: Catalan and Spanish. In addition, recent immigration has brought us in contact with languages that were hardly known in earlier times, such as Amazigh, Chinese, Ukrainian, Urdu, etc. Plurilingualism is more and more a reality, in this diverse society that considers languages as tools for social improvement, European mobility and future employability (Council of Europe, 2011). Enlarging everyone’s language learning options is a more inclusive approach than just facilitating immigrants' acquisition of the local language; it also implies the possibility of maintaining original family languages and the optional spreading of new languages to other learners to empower the whole community for future needs.