Publications

The Basque Government’s Department of Education has embarked on a mission to enhance children’s oral expression and reading and writing abilities across the three languages taught in primary education: Basque, Spanish, and English. To achieve this goal, they introduced the PYCTO methodology as a pilot project during the academic year 2021/2022. Originating in Barcelona in 2012, the PYCTO methodology has demonstrated its efficacy in elevating the quality of narrative and explanatory texts produced by students. Extensive research conducted between 2013 and 2016 across third to sixth grades in six public schools in Barcelona, focusing on Catalan and Spanish languages, underscored its positive impact. However, no prior studies have explored its implementation in the second and third grades of primary education across three typologically distinct languages. Motivated by this gap, the Basque Government initiated a comprehensive analysis of the PYCTO methodology’s effectiveness, with a particular emphasis on four key areas: reading comprehension, writing skills, language proficiency and transfer, and teachers’ attitudes and expectations regarding its multilingual approach. In this study, we exclusively present the findings related to the enhancement of writing skills in the academic year 2022/2023.  

This study employed holistic and analytic assessment measures in writing, encompassing the three curricular languages in the Basque Autonomous Community (Basque, Spanish, and English). The aim was to investigate the writing proficiency of 2nd (ages 7-8) and 3rd (ages 8-9) grade primary education students before and after a multilingual intervention. A total of 843 compositions in Basque, Spanish, and English were analyzed using quantitative methods. Analytic measures assessed lexical richness, while holistic measures evaluated overall writing competence across four dimensions. Results indicated that students who underwent the multilingual intervention demonstrated superior performance compared to those in control groups across both 2nd and 3rd grades. These findings suggest that pedagogies employing a multilingual approach yield greater benefits than those isolating individual languages.