CLIL Students’ Affectivity in the Transition between Education Levels: The Effect of Streaming at the Beginning of Secondary Education

ABSTRACT

This study looks into the affective factors influencing students’ experiences in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) at the beginning of bilingual secondary education (at the age of 11–12), when being streamed into two strands with a different degree of exposure to CLIL, depending on their linguistic competence. Results were drawn from 10 structured interviews with students spotted as salient cases in 157 validated questionnaires. Students’ responses to the interviews were analyzed following Grounded Theory. The categories emerging from the analysis are related to students’ values, attitudes and beliefs towards bilingual education, their motivation, perceptions on learning and degree of satisfaction with their strand. Our findings indicate that instrumental motivation plays an important role in these students’ views, which vary depending on the strand: i.e., students in the high-exposure strand seem to see themselves more at ease and in control of their choices, whereas low-exposure strand students experience more ambivalence over the transition.

KEYWORDS:

• Affective factors
• bilingual education
• CLIL
• educational transition
• streaming
• student self-image

Notes

1. According to ISCED 2011: level 1 corresponds to primary education, and levels 2 and 3 correspond to lower and upper secondary education respectively.

2. Data from academic year 2017-2018 (Madrid Regional Authorities, 2018).

3. Segregation refers to keeping groups of students separate from each other as a result of applying specific education policies. A distinction is made between streaming—i.e., segregation into strands within the same school—and tracking—segregation in different schools.

4. In the BP, students take up one of these two UCLES tests: Key English Test (KET; CEFR level A2) and Preliminary English Test (PET; CEFR level B1). Passing PET or KET, or even failing PET with a certain mark grants access to the HE strand. The LE strand is for students who fail these tests and other students who did not take them (e.g., students from non-bilingual primary schools).

5. The students’ quotes are translated from Spanish.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competition under grant FFI2014-55590-R.

Notes on contributors

María Fernández-Agüero

María Fernández Agüero currently works at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, where she is involved in pre-service and in-service teacher training from primary to tertiary level. Her major research interests are second language teaching and learning, with a special focus on interculturality and bilingual education.

Elisa Hidalgo-McCabe

Elisa Hidalgo McCabe has recently earned her PhD at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, with a thesis topic titled “Streaming in CLIL and its Effects on Students’ Socialisation in School.” Her major research interests are CLIL, bilingual education, second language teaching and learning and language socialisation in learning contexts.