Abstract
The spread of content and language integrated learning (CLIL) has attracted the attention of researchers in recent years. Although some studies investigate language outcomes in CLIL contexts, few of them have focussed exclusively on written competence, and thus results in writing are still scarce and somewhat contradictory. The present chapter makes a contribution in this direction by presenting findings on the development of overall written competence, as well as complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF) in writing, in secondary education CLIL learners and their non-CLIL counterparts. Participants in this study (N = 45) are a group of secondary CLIL students learning science or social science in English (N = 30) and a control group of comparable non-CLIL learners of English through formal instruction (N = 15). The general goal of this chapter is to examine students’ written development under CLIL provision across a 3-year span. More specifically, it aims at investigating whether CLIL instruction has any positive effect on developing EFL written competence. To that end, participants were requested to complete a general composition exercise over four data collection times, which are analysed by using analytical CAF measures and holistic assessment. Results point to significant improvement in CAF and overall holistic assessment for CLIL students between the different data collection times and to an outperformance of CLIL learners for most of the measures explored when compared to their non-CLIL counterparts.
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Notes
- 1.
In a 1-year span, CLIL participants received 210 h of exposure to the target language, compared to the 105 h received by their non-CLIL counterparts.
- 2.
After some trial analyses, we decided to count any verb phrase (either finite or non-finite) as a clause and to consider a sentence as either one T-unit or all the coordinated T-units included between text punctuation marks. We have adopted Hunt’s (1964) T-unit definition, which considers a minimal terminable unit of language or T-unit a main independent clause plus all its subordinate dependent clauses.
- 3.
As regards complexity index, lower values indicate improved performance.
- 4.
In errors per T-unit, the lower the values the better.
- 5.
In accordance with the Bonferroni correction, in comparisons between groups, level of significance (p-value) was set to 0.025.
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Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge funding from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through HUM2007-66053-C02-01/02, FFI2010-21483-C02-01/02, and FFI2013-48640-C2-1/2-P and from the Catalan Government (SGR2005-01086/2009-140/2014-1563).
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Gené-Gil, M., Juan-Garau, M., Salazar-Noguera, J. (2015). Writing Development Under CLIL Provision. In: Juan-Garau, M., Salazar-Noguera, J. (eds) Content-based Language Learning in Multilingual Educational Environments. Educational Linguistics, vol 23. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11496-5_9
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