The objectives that we wanted to achieve with this project responded to the needs we detected in our school. Based on the fact that our school is located in a tourist area, whose economic engine is the tourism sector, one of our greatest efforts has always been directed at promoting the learning of foreign languages, specially English, since it is the international language used in every field of our society. In this sense, we wanted our teachers to update their knowledge of CLIL methodology, observing innovative good practices and learning useful tools and activities for the subjects they teach in English, as well as improve their linguistic competence in English. We also wanted to generate new professional contacts for future Erasmus+ exchange projects and establish stable relationships that would lay the foundations for cooperation to be in line with European education. All this would allow us to carry out future mobilities with which our students, who are at a clear disadvantage compared to the rest of European citizens due to geographical reasons, could obtain a quality education that allows them to access academic and job opportunities on equal terms. . Both activities have contributed decisively to the internationalization plan of IES El Médano, giving a European dimension to our teaching practice and turning it into a benchmark in promoting the learning of foreign languages and in promoting the multiculturalism that characterizes the European society.
Our project , CLIL VIBES: New perspectives on bilingual education, was requested with the aim of continuing the internationalization process and of implementing the European Development Plan of our school. To do this, we analyzed our school needs and designed the objectives that would help us to cover them. It was from our weaknesses that improving the areas of training, management, organization and methodology related to learning foreign languages and, specifically, the English language, became an imperative. The deficiencies that our students present in their linguistic competence in English, and in the competence of sense of initiative and entrepreneurial spirit , constitute a barrier to take advantage of the educational and/or employment opportunities beyond our borders. In order to overcome this handicap, we decided to offer our teachers specific training in the CLIL methodology (= Content and Language Integrated Learning), that is, teaching non-linguistic subjects such as mathematics or history in a foreign language, which in our specific case is English), and the possibility of observing in the classroom the implementation of successful strategies and tools in the aforementioned methodology to review, update and improve the development of the CLIL Program that was already been developed in our school.