Key factors to evaluate the impact of bilingual programs: Employability, mobility and intercultural awareness

María Elena Gómez Parra; Cristina Aránzazu Huertas-Abril; Roberto Espejo-Mohedano

doi:10.30827/portalin.vi35.15453

Key factors to evaluate the impact of bilingual programs: Employability, mobility and intercultural awareness

Authors

María Elena Gómez Parra Universidad de Córdoba
Cristina Aránzazu Huertas-Abril Universidad de Córdoba
Roberto Espejo-Mohedano Universidad de Córdoba

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.30827/portalin.vi35.15453

Keywords:

bilingual programs, success, employability, mobility, intercultural awareness

Abstract

The importance of bilingual education is widely debated in the scientific world; it represents an opportunity for millions of international students in the 21st century, endorsed with varied benefits, including cognitive, neurolinguistic, socio-cultural, academic or labor, among others. The main objective of this work is to evaluate the impact of bilingual education on students who graduated from bilingual programs by measuring three key factors (employability, mobility and intercultural awareness), and comparing the results with those from a group of students who graduated from non-bilingual programs. A factorial analysis was carried out to reduce the size of the original set of variables from 11 to 3, thus constituting a model of scientific efficiency. Finally, this paper shows a statistical evaluation of the real effects that bilingual programs have achieved since implementation, concluding that the three main factors identified here allow the scientific evaluation of the success of bilingual programs.

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Author Biographies

María Elena Gómez Parra, Universidad de Córdoba

María Elena Gómez-Parra is an Associate Professor at the University of Córdoba. Her key research areas include: interculture, BE and early second language acquisition. She is the director of the Research Group HUM-1006, the director of the EMJMD PETaL (Play, Education, Toys and Languages), the IP of some competitive funded research projects on bilingualism: Facing Bilinguals: Study of BE Programs’ Results through Social Data Analysis (EDU2017-84800-R); andLinguApp (PRY208/17), as well as the founder of IBIE (Ibero-American Research Network on Bilingual and Intercultural Education).

Cristina Aránzazu Huertas-Abril, Universidad de Córdoba

Cristina A. Huertas-Abril belongs to the University of Córdoba, Spain. Her research interests are BE, language gap, CALL and EFL. She has participated in several national and international research project and published numerous scientific articles in prestigious journals. She is a member of the Research Group ‘Research in Bilingual and Intercultural Education’ (HUM-1006). She is the co-founder of the Ibero-American Research Network on Bilingual and Intercultural Education (IBIE).

Roberto Espejo-Mohedano, Universidad de Córdoba

Roberto Espejo Mohedano graduated in Mathematical Sciences, specialized in Statistics and PhD in Computer Science (Computational Statistics). He belongs to the Department of Statistics, Operational Research and Econometrics of the University of Córdoba. He is Co-IP of a competitive funded research project on bilingualism (‘Facing Bilinguals: Study of BE Programs’ Results through Social Data Analysis’ – EDU2017-84800-R) and part of the research team of the project ‘LinguApp’ (PRY208/17).

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Published

2021-01-31

How to Cite

Gómez Parra, M. E., Huertas-Abril, C. A., & Espejo-Mohedano, R. (2021). Key factors to evaluate the impact of bilingual programs: Employability, mobility and intercultural awareness. Porta Linguarum An International Journal of Foreign Language Teaching and Learning, (35), 93–104. https://doi.org/10.30827/portalin.vi35.15453

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Issue

No. 35 (2021): January

Section

Articles

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