A wealth of research highlights the importance of multilingual competence as a critical 21st century skill in an age of globalization. To this end, the government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago introduced Spanish instruction at the primary school level, an innovation in education for the country, with beginnings as a pilot project since 2004 and currently as a core subject of its primary school curriculum. The implementation of Spanish as a modern foreign language (MFL) for young learners seeks to harness the benefits of early language learning (ELL) in a bid to promote language and intercultural awareness, thus developing the country’s human resource foreign language capabilities as an economic imperative. This paper presents the results of a pioneering study on the implementation of Spanish in the primary school setting in Trinidad.

Author: Desrian Wilson

Published in: Canada International Conference on Education, 2023

• Date of Conference: 26-28 June, 2023
• DOI: 10.20533/CICE.2023.0053
• Electronic ISBN: 978-1-913572-58-7
• Conference Location: Residence and Conference Centre, Toronto, Canada