ABSTRACT
As we write this chapter, a major turn in our foreign language education policy has taken place, with English replacing Spanish as the compulsory subject at high school level via a presidential decree. As it would be expected, this is not without angry rebuttals from the academic community that sees in the initiative another move towards a neoliberal vision of education and one that clearly marks the connections between language and the economy. That political decision, largely influenced by the private sector interests and in the name of economic recovery, represents a big change in relation to a multicultural perspective that has, if only on paper, been endorsed in the last decades. It is true, though, that making the offer of Spanish compulsory at high school level in 2005 challenged that open approach to the teaching of foreign languages, but the non-obligation of students attending classes was a manoeuvre that kept the spirit of multilingualism alive. 1
