The impact of CLIL on the L2 French and L1 Dutch proficiency of Flemish secondary school pupils

ABSTRACT

Since its official introduction in 2014, an increasing number of Flemish secondary schools provide a CLIL program next to their regular monolingual Dutch programs. This longitudinal study investigates the effect of teaching one or several content subjects in French on secondary school pupils’ L2 French listening comprehension (n = 545) and speaking proficiency (n = 273) as well as on their L1 Dutch reading comprehension (n = 579). To ensure comparability between the CLIL and the non-CLIL groups, data collection started at the onset of secondary education, which aligns with the onset of CLIL programs, and information on relevant background variables such as L2 French motivation and anxiety, contact with L2 French outside school and pupils’ socioeconomic status was incorporated in the analyses. The results show that following a CLIL program has a positive impact on the development of French listening and speaking, whereas it does not affect pupils’ L1 Dutch reading comprehension. These results suggest that even a limited amount of CLIL (i.e. one to five hours per week) can have a positive influence on pupils’ proficiency in the target language.

KEYWORDS:

• CLIL
• L2 proficiency
• motivation
• French

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For statistics and links to the relevant legislation, see https://onderwijs.vlaanderen.be/nl/clil-content-and-language-integrated-learning (Dutch).

2 We use the terms first and second language loosely here to refer to the regular language of instruction (L1) and the CLIL target language (L2). The participants in our empirical study are all either native speakers of Dutch or use Dutch frequently at home, and native speakers of French or frequent users were excluded.

3 Or proficiency in the regular language of education, to be more precise, since not all pupils have the same L1 background due to e.g. migration.

4 Due to copyright reasons we are unable to share the two other tests.

5 https://bilingualism.northwestern.edu/leapq/

6 We operationalised ‘frequently’ here as a combined score of 8 or higher on the two items related to language use at home and with friends/family.

7 This variable was not included in the model for French speaking because of a lack of variance in the data (as well as overlap with the school variable).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by University Colleges Leuven-Limburg (UC Leuven) under Grant 011 PWO CLIL 15.

Notes on contributors

Bram Bulté

Bram Bulté is guest professor at the universities of Brussels (VUB) and Leuven (KU Leuven). He holds a PhD in linguistics and MSc degrees in statistics and artificial intelligence. His research focuses on second language acquisition, machine translation and natural language processing.

Jill Surmont

Jill Surmont works as a language teacher trainer in the multidisciplinary institute of teacher training (MILO) of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. She also teaches in the bachelor-after-bachelor program in multilingual educationof University Colleges Leuven-Limburg (UCLL). Her research is mainly focused on CLIL and multilingualism in the classroom.

Liesbeth Martens

Liesbeth Martens is lecturer and researcher at the teacher training and Art of Teaching expertise centre of University Colleges Leuven-Limburg (UCLL, Belgium), where she coordinates the bachelor-after-bachelor program in multilingual education. She is also PhD student at KU Leuven. Her expertise lies in the field of didactics of foreign language acquisition, early foreign language education and CLIL.