Assessments in CLIL: the interplay between cognitive and linguistic demands and their progression in secondary education

ABSTRACT

In Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) programmes, students learn content knowledge and a second/foreign language (L2) simultaneously. It follows that both content and language are assessed, although research on how to do so remains scarce. This study explores the interplay between cognitive and linguistic demands of CLIL assessments. Having analysed over 4900 questions in Science/Biology textbooks, workbooks and examination papers in Hong Kong, we observed that junior secondary assessments were dominated by low-level cognitive (i.e. recall of knowledge) and linguistic (i.e. no production or word-level production) demands, whereas senior secondary assessments required higher-order thinking skills (i.e. application and analysis of knowledge) expressed in sentences or even texts. Also, based on the analysis of 70 junior secondary students’ performance in school examination papers, we noticed a potential hindrance of linguistic demands to students’ performance in CLIL assessments. These findings together underscore the integral role of language in CLIL assessments and raise questions about the adequacy of existing pedagogical practices in preparing students to tackle both cognitive and linguistic demands in CLIL assessments, particularly when they proceed to higher grade levels where the demands in both dimensions leap. These have significant implications for CLIL assessment design, pedagogy and teacher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Content and language integrated learning
• assessment
• cognitive demands
• academic language

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Yuen Yi Lo is an Assistant Professor of the Faculty of Education, the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include Medium of Instruction policy, Content and Language Integrated Learning, language across the curriculum and assessment.

Daniel Fung is Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His major research interests lie in second language acquisition and content and language integrated learning (CLIL), with particular focuses on language learning strategies, vocabulary acquisition, and classroom interaction.

Notes

1 The EMI education in Hong Kong has been regarded as late immersion (e.g. Johnson and Swain 1994), but according to Lasagabaster and Sierra (2010), the EMI education in Hong Kong possesses characteristics of both immersion and CLIL. On the other hand, Dalton-Puffer et al. (2014) proposed that CLIL is best conceptualised as an umbrella term covering a range of programme types, which is also the position adopted in this paper. In this sense, EMI education should also be regarded as a variant of CLIL.

2 As stated in the main text, we intended to focus on ‘Biology’ subject. However, the curriculum in Hong Kong combines Biology, Physics and Chemistry into a key learning area ‘Science’ for junior secondary level (grade 7–9, 12–15 years of age). Therefore, the questions we analysed came from Science/Biology subjects.

3 It has to be noted that we could only access the questions in the textbooks and workbooks available in the market. It is understood that the publisher also provides a question bank with more questions, which is only accessible by schools and teachers subscribed to the textbooks.

4 There were actually 1944 questions found in senior secondary Biology textbooks. However, 327 questions were extracted from past HKDSE papers and so these questions were removed to avoid overlapping when comparing the different assessments.

5 The better performance in application than recall questions which required no language production appears counter-intuitive, as we would expect that higher cognitive demand would pose hindrance to students’ performance. One possibility is that cognitive demand is only impeding students’ performance when there is some productive linguistic demand. In other words, it is cognitive demand coupled with linguistic demand which hampers students’ performance. Nevertheless, further research is warranted in order to explain this interesting observation.

6 One caveat is that the HKDSE Examination Reports were the same for both the English and Chinese version of assessment. In other words, when describing the candidates’ performance, HKEAA did not differentiate how students taking the English version might be different from those taking the Chinese one. However, we would intuitively suggest that the statements about problems with spelling, writing cohesive sentences and texts would be more relevant to students taking the English version because of the bigger language barrier when students need to use their L2 English productively. We are fully aware that further research would be needed to provide evidence for this speculation.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Language Fund under Research and Development Projects 2015–16 of the Standing Committee on Language Education and Research (SCOLAR), Hong Kong SAR.