Journal of Immersion and Content-Based Language Education - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2018

Research has suggested that motivation plays a significant role in language learning but that females tend to be more motivated language learners than males. Content and language integrated learning (CLIL) has been suggested as a means of narrowing this motivational gender gap, although there is as yet little empirical evidence to support this claim. In the current study, data regarding the motivation of 581 learners in bilingual and mainstream tracks of Dutch secondary education were analysed for interaction effects in terms of Gender, Education Type, and Year of CLIL study. In this context, it seemed that boys who had chosen bilingual education were the most positive and motivated regarding the learning of English, although girls had more positive attitudes regarding languages in general. No interactions were observed between Gender, Education Type, and Year, suggesting that existing differences may have influenced boys’ decision to follow bilingual education rather than the reverse.

This article reports on findings from a small-scale qualitative study performed in a CLIL setting in a Norwegian lower secondary school. The study explored the effect of a six-week CLIL intervention project combining history and English on 27 Norwegian ninth graders’ motivation to engage in classroom oral activities and, consequently, their willingness to communicate (WTC) orally, as well as factors triggering and constraining the students’ WTC in the CLIL lessons. Data were collected through classroom observations, teacher pre- and post-interviews, and student pre- and post-questionnaires. The findings revealed that the CLIL intervention had reinforced most students’ motivation and WTC orally compared to their regular EFL lessons. The study adds to the sparse CLIL research in Norway.

There are two primary goals for this study – first, to analyse definiteness and article use in spontaneous writing in Swedish by 15-year-old Finnish immersion students (n = 162) and secondly, to compare their performance with that of non-immersion students at the same age (n = 67). Analyses at the group level show that immersion students usually perform significantly better than the control group, but they also reveal similar problems to what L2-Swedish non-immersion students have demonstrated in previous studies, such as omission of indefinite articles and difficulty in choosing the right definite form of the noun. Still, these inaccuracies occurred less often in the data from the immersion students. The studied constructions also show at the group level an acquisition order similar to that reported in previous studies, explainable by different aspects of complexity and cross-linguistic influence. Analyses on the individual level, however, show different acquisition orders depending on the criteria being used.

This study explores the effect of CLIL on the acquisition of nominal morphology (syntax-morphology interface) and article use (syntax-semantics-discourse-interface), linguistic areas that have been scarcely investigated in CLIL settings. Here we compare article omission and overuse errors in an oral production task performed by L1 Basque-Spanish learners of L3 English in two CLIL and non-CLIL groups matching in age at testing time and amount of exposure. Results indicate that as regards nominal morphology, CLIL and non-CLIL learners are equal in terms of the omission of the definite and the indefinite article, but CLIL learners learn to solve article overuse more quickly than non-CLIL learners. Taking together these results and the findings from our previous study ( Martínez-Adrián & Gutiérrez-Mangado, 2015a ), which revealed the non-existence of CLIL benefits with respect to the acquisition of verbal morphology, we conclude that while the syntax-morphology interface seems to be unaffected by CLIL, CLIL can aid in the acquisition of features from the syntax-semantics-discourse interface.

This article summarizes the findings of a corpus-based study investigating assessment for learning (AfL) and its relationship to motivation in CLIL contexts. Using a mixed methods approach, classroom recordings from bilingual primary schools in Madrid, Spain, were analyzed to identify motivational strategies used by teachers. The relationship between these strategies and the AfL techniques implemented by teachers was then examined.

The findings show that the implementation of AfL coincided with an increase in frequency, length of time of use, and variety of teacher motivational strategies. This led to classes in which activities were supported by a more motivational discourse. A qualitative analysis of the corpus shows that the incorporation of AfL techniques coincided with several motivational strategies for language learning. The findings contribute to an understanding of how the use of AfL techniques may contribute to integrating motivational strategies in a more systematic way in the CLIL educational context.