Barreras para la comunicación en el aulael caso del profesorado de secundaria y el alumnado extranjero

Abstract

When a new student enters the Spanish educational system, coming from a non-Spanish speaking country (as is the case of most foreign students who are enrolled in the classrooms of Compulsory Secondary Education in public schools), it is inevitable that we ask ourselves the following question: How will they communicate with their new classmates, and with their teacher? This, and other doubts, arise because these students would come with a linguistic handicap that would greatly hinder communication between them and the rest of the people in the center. The situation that arises is very recurrent in the educational centers of our country. More and more students are joining the school late and with a lack of knowledge of the school’s vehicular language (Boussif, 2019). We are, therefore, facing a complicated situation, the results of which can be very negative, especially for the student, who will see his academic performance decrease, and will feel misunderstood and lost due to the inability to make himself understood. Also for the teacher, who will find it difficult to communicate with his student, and will have to adapt to an increasingly diverse classroom, adapting his teaching methodologies, his evaluation system, etc. This study attempts to investigate, above all, the communication between teacher and student: does the teacher have an interpreting and translation service available? do they communicate with body language? does another student, fluent in both languages, act as a translator? Obviously, the ideal would be for the center to hire a professional service for this task (Sánchez, 2016), especially in situations where it is very important for communication to be fluid. The results of this study show several conclusions, some of them being that there is rarely a translation and interpretation service in the centers, and that in most cases it is the students who act as interpreters