Participant groups: ALLENCAM (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), ELEBILAB (Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea), UVALAL (Universidad de Valladolid), GRAM (Universitat Internacional de Catalunya), Grup Llenguatge i Cognició (Universitat de Girona), LVTC (Universidade de Vigo), BASLA (Universitat de les Illes Balears)  

Summary: In the last few years, the discussion about the utility, benefits, and effectiveness of bilingual and multilingual education in Spain has been questioned creating heated debates in the society. Several political parties of different ideologies have used this topic with purposes unrelated to linguistic issues. In many occasions, these groups have based their statements in impressionistic, biased data, with a worrisome lack of scientific rigor. This network is created to raise awareness of the need of grounding the debates on linguistic education on academic studies. As researchers in this area, we believe one can only objectively argue in favor or against certain linguistic educational practices with reliable data. Hence, the importance of sharing scientific results from recent studies on bi/multilingualism from different areas of Spain.

We focus on three types of bi/multilingualism:

1. Societal historical bilingualism, typical of regions such as Catalonia, Galicia or the Basque Country;
2. Recent bilingualism as the result of new waves of migration, which has produced that an important part of the children come to class with languages such as Arabic, Urdu, Amazigh, Russian or Italian;
3. Bi/multilingualism with a foreign global language such as English.

This network has the following goals:

1. To analyze the bi/multilingualism situation and the linguistic phenomena that take place in representative zones of Spain (Catalonia, Galicia, Basque Country, Balearic Islands, Central Area);
2. To compare the linguistic achievements of different educational practices implemented in each region and evaluate the factors that favor the development of multilingualism and the maintenance of minority languages;
3. To exchange unique and shared experiences in order to reveal universal patterns of bilingualism and/or idiosyncratic patterns of each region;
4. To improve the training of young linguists as well as educators on issues related to bi/multilingualism, so we highlight the importance of taking into account bilingualism factors in the development of language as well as the progress of verbal and literacy skills; and
5. To create standardized materials that serve to reliably measure language dominance, as well as to isolate the external variables that have a higher impact in that dominance. In a nutshell, we intend to create a collaboration network that becomes a scientific referent on bi/multilingualism in Spain and, in turn, give national and international visibility to our field of research.