Júlia Ojeda: “For linguistic immersion to be real, it would have to be voluntary”

Why is linguistic immersion not working? A conversation with Júlia Ojeda. / Photo: courtesy of the author

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Giovanni Pelegi Torres

According to all available data, Catalan is experiencing a clear social decline. In Catalonia, the latest survey on the social use of language—published in November 2025 by the Department of Language Policy and by Idescat¹—concludes that Catalan is the main language of everyday use for fewer than 25% of residents in the Barcelona metropolitan area, and that the only regions where this figure exceeds 50% are the least populated parts of the country.

In education, these figures are clearly reflected in everyday school life. In many schools Catalan is far from being the language most commonly used among pupils, but it is also increasingly common to see students stop using Catalan with their teachers, as well as a growing presence of teaching delivered in Spanish. After more than four decades since the introduction of immersion policies, the results have clearly fallen short of initial expectations.

What are the consequences of this rapid shift in the linguistic landscape? Can anything be done? How does this affect the work of specialist teachers? I had the opportunity to discuss these and other questions with Júlia Ojeda (Granollers, 1994) in a café in Sants. A postdoctoral researcher at the University of the Balearic Islands specialising in literary studies, she combines her academic career with political involvement in the platform Alhora. Ojeda, who advocates the implementation of a dual school network inspired by the Basque model, believes this to be the only way to guarantee genuine linguistic immersion, emphasising the voluntary nature of the process as an essential condition.

How do you see the current situation of Catalan in education?

It is clearly in decline, directly linked to the general retreat of the language across all social domains. Immersion is not working because it is not real, and we clearly need to change the model. Some people still believe that the problem is simply that immersion is not being properly implemented and that expanding resources and reinforcing total immersion would solve the issue. But this view stems from a failure to carry out the necessary groundwork of analysing where immersion has actually worked, where it has not, and why.

“According to the available data, real immersion currently exists in roughly 15% of schools and 17% of secondary schools”

Why do you say immersion is not real?

Let me begin with a methodological clarification. Contrary to what we have believed since the 1980s, the current system is not one of linguistic immersion but of linguistic conjunction. If the demographic-linguistic majority within a school speaks Catalan, Spanish tends to be confined to the Spanish-language subject and to occasional pedagogical use when necessary. In those cases there is immersion.

However, if the normal language of use is Spanish—which is the reality in the majority of state schools—what we have instead is a situation of bilingualism and diglossia: Catalan in the classroom and Spanish in the playground or among friends. Technically speaking, this is not immersion. Current data suggest that real immersion exists in roughly 15% of schools and 17% of secondary schools.

In which contexts?

Where the demographic-linguistic majority outside the classroom is also reflected inside the classroom. Real immersion occurs only in schools where Catalan speakers form the majority—for instance in the Terres de l’Ebre and a few other areas—or where the school leadership is sufficiently strong to implement immersion as a method.

This second case is particularly interesting, because it is where immersion policy clearly has an impact. In those contexts, many students have Catalan as an L2, a second language of acquisition, and it is through immersion techniques that schools succeed in making that L2 the main language used among students, who are predominantly L1 speakers of other languages, whether Spanish or not. However, this system of immersive techniques requires a set of tools that the current education system simply does not possess.

Why do you say the system lacks these tools?

Because the current model establishes a system in which Catalan and Spanish share the role of language of instruction, the result is a gradual shift towards Spanish as the dominant language in schools, reflecting the linguistic reality of most of them. We are all very stubborn in insisting that the problem lies in the poor implementation of immersion, but that is not true. The reality is that in most cases immersion has never actually been implemented. Where was it genuinely applied? In Santa Coloma de Gramenet in the 1980s. Why? Because families there—mostly Spanish-speaking—demanded that Catalan be introduced in their children’s schools. What happened then was a complete alignment between families, school leadership teams and the resources of the school.

The current problem is that these initiatives have gradually deteriorated in areas where the immersion model was initially implemented and where demographic-linguistic conditions favoured Catalan. But Catalan has been declining more broadly, not only in schools. The more Catalan declines in everyday life, the more it declines in schools.

“Catalan has been declining more broadly, not only in schools. The more Catalan declines in everyday life, the more it declines in schools”

So, is this mainly a question of resources and methodology?

No. This is the key point: guaranteeing immersion requires not only immersion techniques and sociolinguistic training for teachers, but above all the consent of families (and therefore of students), the teaching staff and the school leadership.

Immersion can only exist if it is voluntary and desired. This was precisely what happened in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, when families said they wanted a school fully conducted in Catalan because, otherwise, their children would never learn the language.

That turns around an argument sometimes linked to the idea of educational freedom. But you are saying immersion must be voluntary.

Exactly. For immersion to be real, it would have to be voluntary. Only if there is agreement between the teaching staff and families can the mechanisms and resources required for genuine immersion be implemented without being constantly challenged. They must be accepted and actively supported. Only in this way can segregation be avoided.

What kind of segregation are we talking about?

The current model is causing families who want to guarantee that their children receive schooling entirely in Catalan to seek out schools—state or state-subsidised—often far from their neighbourhoods.

This dynamic reinforces economic segregation, since many families move their children to state-subsidised schools, but it also produces cultural and ethnic segregation through a process of linguistic pressure on linguistically conscious families.

“Imposing linguistic immersion or language pedagogy is always a double-edged sword that eventually backfires”

So, what should be done?

A dual school network inspired by the Basque model. One could take the map of educational centres in Catalonia and begin with thirty, fifty or a hundred schools—regardless of their geographical location—based on two basic conditions.

First, a leadership team determined to implement an immersion system with the necessary mechanisms, resources and linguistic planning. Second, the approval of the educational community.

In such centres a comprehensive plan could be implemented: language support staff in informal school settings, in school canteens, interventions in pupils’ language-use dynamics, and so on. But this would only work if the educational community genuinely wished it. Otherwise it would clearly be perceived as an imposition, and that would make it unviable. Imposing linguistic immersion or language pedagogy is always a double-edged sword that eventually backfires.

Where do you think the first centres implementing real immersion would be located?

There are areas where it would be extremely difficult because Catalan is, from a linguistic-demographic point of view, very distant from everyday use. In those contexts, there is simply not enough linguistic capital for pupils to find peer language models among themselves.

However, one could also make the opposite argument. There are schools where many families have foreign languages as their first language—Arabic or Urdu, for instance—as in places such as Olot or parts of the Terres de l’Ebre. In such cases genuine immersion might work precisely because there could be greater awareness of its importance. Ultimately, everything depends on that.

Would this not create competition between schools?

Yes—but that is precisely the idea. Instead of constantly pressuring pupils to speak Catalan, which often generates considerable frustration among teachers, the system would acknowledge reality and operate with greater transparency.

At the same time, an evaluation system would have to be implemented in order to know the real academic level of students in all schools across Catalonia.

The Department of Education has always refused to publish the results of academic assessments—known as the competències bàsiques—by school.

Because it would be embarrassing. Academic failure at the system-wide level is very evident. The failure of immersion is also evident, but they refuse to acknowledge it. There should be an annual certification system for linguistic proficiency in schools. Obviously, the automatic awarding of a C1 certificate in Catalan at the end of compulsory secondary education should also be abolished. That would immediately restore some value to the language. And of course knowledge of Catalan should be valued when accessing certain jobs. That would complete the necessary cycle linking language learning to academic achievement.

“An evaluation system would have to be implemented in order to know the real academic level of students in all schools across Catalonia”

Would a dual network not mean a retreat for Catalan?

Yes and no. It would mean being realistic about the situation. We need to ensure that the public education system continues to produce specialists in Catalan language and literature, historians, sociolinguists, translators working in Catalan, writers in Catalan, and so on. We need to strengthen education so as to ensure generational renewal and reinforce the linguistic foundations of the population. When we speak about linguistic immersion we are not speaking only about language but about a system of values, a worldview, a way of teaching history, a way of explaining literature, and a broader cultural and civic framework.

What we would have, in practice, would be two networks: one identical to the current system and another genuinely immersive. This would in fact be less segregating than the present system, because the differentiation between models would depend primarily on the will of the educational community rather than on the economic and sociolinguistic realities of each area, since in some areas the two are closely connected.

Could something similar happen here to what occurred in the Basque Country, where families and teachers gradually embraced the immersion network until it became the majority?

Studies in the Basque Country suggest that this system works and that it creates a virtuous cycle of competition that spreads the commitment and willingness necessary for real immersion. Ultimately, this helps guarantee a better education. However, it took the Basques forty years to reach roughly 80% real immersion. Naturally, the administration bears responsibility and must invest substantial resources, particularly in contexts of high linguistic and cultural complexity: teacher training, language support staff, trained extracurricular staff, and so forth. Pupils must be able to socialise outside the classroom while incorporating Catalan as a language of leisure and everyday life. Above all, it is a matter of precision in public investment. Instead of wasting resources—as often happens now—on rather pointless teacher training courses, those resources could be invested here.

And what would happen to the state-subsidised and private schools?

From a linguistic perspective, Catalonia currently has three networks: a minority immersion network, a majority conjunction network (both divided between public and state-subsidised schools), and an international network in the private sector based on immersion in foreign languages. The latter can be left aside. As for the state-subsidised schools, if public funding is to continue, it should only do so on the condition that schools implement genuine immersion, and only as a transitional measure. The long-term objective should be a fully public, accessible and universal system.

That said, at the initial stage of implementing genuine immersion, state-subsidised schools could act as allies. Much of the competition between state and state-subsidised schools in Catalonia is driven by linguistic factors, and that competition would be significantly reduced with a dual public network.

“Much of the competition between state and state-subsidised schools is driven by linguistic factors; a dual public network would greatly reduce this”

Could this proposal face opposition from teachers? Although the current system may in fact be more segregating than a dual network, the perception might well be the opposite.

Possibly. But it is important to understand that the dual network would not be implemented according to social, linguistic, geographical or demographic criteria. If families’ associations and teaching staff want it, it will happen. If they do not, it will not. Without the full support of the educational community the system simply cannot function. If teachers opposed it, it could not be implemented.

The proposal is designed to be built from the bottom up: a fully democratic approach that reinforces the sovereignty of teaching staff and promotes a democratic model of school governance, very different from the current one.

If an educational community is strong and committed, the entire education system benefits in every respect, not only in linguistic matters. Many conflicts can thus be avoided at all levels. It should also be noted that this proposal is entirely feasible within the current legal framework.

Beyond this, do you think other aspects of the education system should also change?

Clearly. A dual network that made the real situation of immersion visible would have to be accompanied by a return to a knowledge-based model of education and the abandonment of the current competence-based approach. We need to move away from abstract frameworks that do not work and return to more tangible forms of teaching and learning.

The format of the teacher-training master’s programme would also need to change, as it is currently deeply flawed. It has become an absurd form of credentialism that places excessive emphasis on pedagogy while neglecting subject knowledge. This problem is even more acute in primary teacher education.

Finally, the reduction of Catalan and science subjects in the upper-secondary curriculum is scandalous and clearly undermines the strength of the education system.

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¹ Official statistical institute of the Government of Catalonia.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons