O’Brien López, Elsa Margaret2024-05-202024-05-202022-10-17https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14468/15056There is no question about English being a global language. Its success as a lingua franca makes it difficult to define exactly how many people speak it worldwide. And yet, English can still exercise a ‘gatekeeping’ function in some countries (Joseph, M. and Ramani E. 2006). Bilingual Education programmes in the European Union have been developed and implemented in order to comply with the recommendation of the European Commission (2012) to grant access to quality English learning to students from all socioeconomic backgrounds. In this research we conduct an in-depth analysis of literature pointing at contradictorily successful implementations of bilingual programmes. Despite the initial controversy, all the latest research on the performance of the bilingual programme in the Region of Madrid, seems to converge in proving the competitive advantage of students attending these schools. In this paper, we explore the array of possible reasons pinpointing this methodology, that allow students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds to catch up with their peers. Qualitative interviews shed some light on the possible reasons behind the success of the Region of Madrid’s bilingual programme and CLIL methodology. These results are in line with the ones obtained in previous research carried out in bilingual schools in Andalusia. However, this study highlights the relevance of teaching assistants as an educational resource in the bilingual classroom and calls for further research on this variable to quantify its importance and compare and understand the use that is made of it across different programmes.eninfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccesstesis de maestríaBilingual programmeCLIL methodologyEnglish as a Medium of InstructionTeacher PerceptionsRegion of Madrid