A framework of the bilingual secondary schools in the Community of Madrid and a perspective of dance to help build up other areas

Resumen

This research aims to explore how Secondary Bilingual Schools in the Community of Madrid develop their work and whether they make use of the Theory of Multiple Intelligences as a tool to facilitate students¿ learning. These intelligences are bodily-kinesthetic, musical, linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal and naturalist. Our work will focus on bodily kinesthetic intelligence. The first part of the study explores the work which has been carried out by teachers, students and language assistants. To do so, we have administered questionnaires and observed classes. The second part of the research extends the investigation to find out if ballet dancers and flamenco dancers have a significant improvement in the domains of phonetics and chemistry when trained with the aid of dance. Both groups will be compared with the control group (a group of regular students, who will receive the same training through a traditional method). Finally, it is shown head teachers are not aware of MI and its benefits to the class. Although teachers sometimes rely on music and dance in their classes, the reason is merely to motivate students rather than knowledge about MI Theory. With regard to assessment, all teachers agreed that assessments are important. Concerning language assistants, we unearthed that the BEDA program and the Franklin Institute have more prepared assistants (compared to the public school) as both institutions train their assistants for one year and are more aware of MI principles than head teachers. 80% of Franklin assistants take into account their students¿ strengths and weaknesses. With respect to students, 40 % of public schools students and the totality of BEDA students benefit from music and dance in the classroom and all students without exception enjoy learning through these aids. The fact that most students understand their classes in English and all of them were able to understand and answer the questionnaire of this study in English, show us that the bilingual program is efficient to teach a second language and that students are able to express themselves in the L2 as well. However, most students showed a strong Spanish accent. As evidenced in the results, training is an effective way to improve both pronunciation and chemical elements. A great improvement can be observed after each posttest, mainly in the experimental groups in which dance was used as a potent stimulus to help students to better intake the content.