English in Spain: Education, attitudes and native‐speakerism

Abstract

Spain has traditionally featured rather low in the rankings measuring the knowledge of English by European citizens, and yet English has been constantly entering different areas of Spanish life and in all levels of education. This article delves into the efforts made at different levels of education to enable school graduates to communicate in English without difficulty. It focuses on how young people conceptualise English: their attitudes towards the language and to what extent they associate it with Inner Circle countries, or whether instead they see it as a tool for international communication. This discussion is complemented with an analysis of the pervasiveness of ‘native‐speakerism’ in Spanish society, which we claim acts as another handicap to the normalisation of the use of English as a lingua franca by Spanish citizens in multicultural settings within and outside the country.