Bilingual education grows quickly worldwide (Cummins, 2001), and this expansion and progress require that teachers raise their awareness about receiving permanent training. The role of teachers is one of the fundamental pillars for the bilingual students to find quality (Escobar, 2013) and utility, and the university must be engaged and must be responsible for the training of pre-service teachers (Martín, 2009), and it should analyse the whole process in order to monitor and improve bilingual education programs. Bilingual education teachers not only should work on linguistic competences, but also on methodological competences, and all that takes time, engagement, motivation and collaboration (Doiz, Lasagabaster y Pavón, 2019). Although universities are developping a solid way to internationalisation, it is important to get teachers prepared for that, and there is still much to be done in this respect.

Specific methodologies have been developed and proposed to be implemented in bilingual classrooms during the last years, being EMI – English as a Medium of Instruction - (Fielden, Rico and Hernández, 2018) and CLIL – Content and Language Integrated Learning - considered the most powerful methodologies in bilingual programs (Delicado and Pavón, 2015). CLIL (Marsh, 1994) is an educative dual approach, because it uses a second language (L2) learning and a non linguistic-related subject, and it is based on different methodologies (Coyl, Hood and Marsh, 2010), such as flipped classroom, gamification or collaborative learning, among others, through the scaffolding technique, that is, a constructive, interactive and communicative learning (Marsh, Pavón-Vázquez y Frigols-Martín., 2013).

Therefore, CLIL has become the essential formula to meet the needs of current bilingual education teachers (Delicado y Pavón, 2015). In addition, this collaborative and evolutionary scenario that CLIL offers is undergone by pre-service teachers especially during the internship period, which take place in primary education centers of Extremadura. The University of Extremadura holds on its Teachers’ Training College a bilingual track for the Primary Education Degree since 2015, degree guaranteed by the national agency of quality (ANECA) that offers the same itineraries than the not bilingual track: Foreign Languages, Music, Physical Education and General or No Specific itineraries.

Besides, the Teachers’ Training College of Cáceres signed an original agreement with the General Secretariat of Education from the Government of Extremadura from which they would offer a Call for participating in the bilingual methodology training program (CLIL Program from now onwards), according to Instruction 6/2019. For that matter, this work presents a research held in the Teachers’ Training College (University of Extremadura, Spain) where in-service bilingual teachers, called advisory teachers – “maestros asesores” (Delicado y Pavón, 2015), selected from an official scale - have taught a CLIL Program addressed to in-service and pre-service teachers from the Pre-School and Primary Education Degree (bilingual and not bilingual track). Every advisory teacher teaches a workshop, whose topics follow a roadmap that includes topics like ICTs in bilingual centers, family and tutorship, sociological aspects, psychological development, materials and resources, management and direction, innovation, Science, Literacy, Arts, Music or Physical Education.

The aim of this research is to study the impact of the CLIL Program on the trainees’ general and specific competences, and our hypothesis addresses to a positive impact of the CLIL Program on pre-service teachers. In order to measure that impact, we have identified all the competences development through the Vilkanciené and Rozgiené (2017) questionnaire of competences.

This research is framed on an empirical-analytical quantitative study using a hypothetical-deductive analytical model from which casual relations between the independent variable (ID) and the dependent variables (DV) are established. Then, a quasi-experimental quantitative methodology has been developed, in a natural context, with a partial control of variables, internal validity and generalization possibilities (Ramos, 2019). The research design is non equivalent control group, also known as pretest and postest design, where there are two groups, the control group (CG) and the experimental group (EG), that are applied a pretest in a non-randomly way. The CG remains impassable, while the EG receives a treatment: the CLIL Program, in this case. The sample is composed by 265 pre-service teachers, which is the total population of the 2018-2019 course. There are 165 individuals from the primary education degree (110 from non bilingual track and 55 from the bilingual track) and 100 from pre-school education degree. The vast majority belongs to the control group (n = 231) while the rest belongs to the experimental group (n = 34). The whole sample were twice (pretest and postest) implemented an adapted version of a Vilkanciené and Rozgiené (2017) questionnaire, an excellent reliable questionnaire according to the Cronbach alpha value (α = 0,909), and whose 10 Líkert-type items have also passed the Kaiser Mayer Olkin test with an optimal result (KMO = ,837) and the sphericity Barlett test with a result of ,000. Hence, the total variance obtained thanks to SPSS are reduced to 2 factors: Factor 1, general competences, composed of 6 items, to evaluate the improvement of abilities, resources and linguistic communication; and Factor 2, specific competences, composed of 4 items, to evaluate the improvement of the CLIL methodological approach. The data collection was executed from March to June 2019, regarding two aspects: the time of Practicum II subject to all 4th year pre-service teachers of all education degrees and it was also the time when the CLIL Program was held.

Results indicate a positive tendency for the implementation of the CLIL training program on in-service teachers and Teacher Training College’s students, above all referring to specific competences. Such results prove that a regulated training addressed to pre-service teachers serves well to the learning and development of the students’ competences, for both bilingual and not bilingual groups. Nevertheless, although the CLIL Program improves the competences of every individual, we observe that it improves significantly the general competences of the bilingual group and the specific competences of the whole group of the foreign languages itinerary. Besides, we verify that the CLIL Program is complementary and additional to the education degrees syllabuses and we also conclude that a 50-hours program is adequate to acquire the necessary CLIL competences. One of the main reasons why the CLIL Program is so useful lies on the fact that the CLIL training program educates on theory, practical cases and the sharing of experiences brought by the professional trainers, providing the participants with different perspective about the educational reality. Finally, this research has shown some limitations, like the non-controllable variable or the limited capacity for the CLIL Program registration, and we contemplate that this research is aimed to be completed by a qualitative research in order to strengthen the quantitative results obtained.

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