Publications

Content versus language teacher: How are CLIL students affected?

Book Title
Integration of Theory and Practice in CLIL
Editors
Ruth Breeze et al.
Year
2014
Pages
123 - 141
DOI
Publisher
Rodopi
Links

The CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) approach is undergoing an enormous boom on all the rungs of the Spanish educational ladder, which has led many research teams to analyse how this new approach affects both content and foreign language learning. However, there are still many questions that remain unanswered, one of them being whether the teacher’s background or profile exerts any influence on students’ foreign language learning. In thisThis study focuses on two teachers, one more focused on content and the other on both content and language, and analyses took part and their impact on student motivation and on students’ perceptions about their language improvement were analysed. The sample was made up of 23 university undergraduates who had been enrolled in a CLIL program for a whole academic year to become familiar with specific literary terminology. The instrument was a questionnaire that included both open-ended and closed and open-ended items in which students were invited to convey their perceptions about their English improvement in the four language skills and the classroom aspects to which more heed should be paid in the CLIL context. Analysis of the data leads us to the conclusion that the teachers’ background conditions student learning is less determining than expected.