2.3 Syllabuses of Religion Education and English in Madrid

All the texts we will propose for work in the classroom meet the features described above. Only canonical Gospels will be considered. For example, the so called Gospel of Thomas contains many of the same oral traditions that will be ignored in this project, as well as short stories for Apocrypha.

The Oxford 3000TM is a list of the words which should receive priority in vocabulary study because of their importance and usefulness, according to the experts who have developed it. The Oxford Text Checker has been deployed to put it into action. This tool -available on the Internet- gives back the percentage of words in a text that are included in the Oxford 3000TM .

As it is well known, too many new or difficult words could make comprehension impossible. In order to help balance new and known vocabulary, all our texts will have at least 90% of their vocabulary contained in Oxford 3000TM. Proper names such as Jerusalem, Christ, Samaritan, Pharisees, etc. won’t be considered in this calculation. This content words will be explained by teacher using vocabulary teaching methodologies. To reach the proportion or new vocabulary already mentioned, some changes in the original texts could be made without mentioning, provided the meaning and message of the text remains the same.

2.3 Syllabuses of Religion Education and English in Madrid

In March 2014 the Ministry of Education in Spain has published the national curriculum for the Primary Stage. When it comes to English, contents are organized according to the Common European Framework (CEF) for Languages. Curriculum is made of contents, criteria for assessment and standards. This three aspects are grouped in four sections that correspond to the four basic skills: listening (comprensión de textos orales), speaking (producción de textos orales: expression e interacción), reading (comprensión de textos escritos) and writing (producción de textos escritos: expression e interacción).

Despite the reference to the CEF, no level of English is established for the Primary Stage as an objective to be achieved by all children. According to article 7.f. of the law (Real Decreto 126/2014), the aim for this stage is to achieve the basic communicative competence that will prepare children to produce and understand simple messages and cope with everyday contexts. We consider that the so called standards by the Ministry of Education could also fall into the category of language functions or communicative tasks. Finally, this Real Decreto adds to the curriculum a set of syntactic – discursive contents that we could refer to as inventory of grammatical areas. These are much more specific and help us in a great deal to know what level of English should be the target for year 6 of this stage.

The Ministry of Education rules for the whole nation. The Autonomous Region of Madrid will specify for itself what the Ministry of Education has established for all. This development has not taken place so far, as of May 14, 2014. Right now and, for sure, during this course year 2013-2014 and the next one, the curriculum for Madrid is drawn up in the Decreto 22/2007 of this Autonomous Region. This is a more detailed curriculum. But, what are the specific standards for schools in Madrid