English Spanish bilingualism shown by adolescents in the Canary Islands indicates the need for integrated education proposals in multilingual communities

Code-switching has been considered as a pedagogical tool for bilingual education on many occasions, but not in immigration communities in the Canary Islands, Spain. This research focuses on cases of English and English-Spanish bilingual adolescents who have attended school from a young age in the municipality of Yaiza, Canary Islands. A questionnaire on code-switching, language preference, and self evaluated dominance was presented to 29 students in two centres pertaining to these areas and, following results that indicate acceptance towards bilingual constructions, three exercises were devised in the form of a didactic proposal to be adapted to secondary education centres that show similar characteristics as those pertaining to the study. This paper aims to shed light on the necessity for more integral and linguistically tolerant learning environments for students of all profiles, particularly relevant in such fast-changing multilingual environments such as those mentioned in the following pages.