Relationship between Learning English as a Foreign Language and the Executive Attention Profile in Spanish Schoolchildren

Abstract

English has become established as the most widely used language worldwide, and forms part of the educational curriculum in many institutions. The classroom has thus become the main learning space where conditions must be met for the student to communicate in this language. Here, as in other academic subjects, students have taken on an active role in their own learning, implying greater initiative and responsibility in the development of their own skills in the language in question (Beltrán, 2017;Luna et al., 2014). In Spain, since the General Education Act of 1970, the subject of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) has become more and more important in the school curriculum, becoming the first foreign language to be included as a subject in the core curriculum, as is reflected in current legislation. Regarding language immersion, more and more bilingual programs are being implemented in recent years, turning English into an instrument for learning more than merely being another academic subject (Valero & Jiménez-Fernández, 2015). Within the pedagogical context, bilingualism is considered to be a vehicle for learning, through an educational system where the student is instructed for a certain period of time in two different languages, one of them being the student's first language or mother tongue (Fishman, 1976 as cited in Castro-Castiblanco & Zuluaga-Valencia, 2019.