The effects of CLIL on oral comprehension and production: a longitudinal case study

ABSTRACT

This article reports on the outcomes of a longitudinal case study to gauge the impact of content and language integrated learning (CLIL) on two of the least researched language skills: oral comprehension and production. It worked with 24 students in the fourth grade of Compulsory Secondary Education in a public school in Andalusia (southern Spain) over the course of a year and a half in order to measure the impact of CLIL on oral comprehension and production skills after a one-year intervention programme (post-test) and to determine whether its effects pervade after a six-month period (second post-test), when these same students are in Baccalaureate. The results reveal that, contrary to what has traditionally been sustained in bilingual education, it was productive, as opposed to receptive, oral skills which were more positively affected by CLIL in the medium- and long term. The outcomes also provide interesting data on what aspects of oral competence are particularly amenable to being taught through CLIL (e.g. more cognitively complex listening activities) and which need to de developed over a longer time span in order to be significantly improved (e.g. pronunciation and fluency).

KEYWORDS:

• CLIL
• longitudinal
• quantitative
• oral comprehension
• oral production

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the school management and the students who participated in the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Compare online Appendix 1 for a description of the APPP.

2. Compare online Appendix 2 for a detailed description of the methodology followed with the CLIL and non-CLIL groups.

3. Compare online Appendix 3 for a detailed description of both tests and online Appendices 4 and 5 for the actual listening and speaking tests, respectively.

4. The intervention programme refers to the methodology followed with the CLIL group (cf. online Appendix 2 for a detailed description).

5. The scoring of the listening test was completely objective since it was done anonymously (students were assigned a number rather than being identified by name) and it comprised only closed items consisting of true/false, multiple-choice and matching questions (cf. Test design). The speaking test was more subjective in its scoring, so the first author also rated the tests, which were recorded for subsequent consultation, in an anonymous way, obtaining an inter-rater reliability coefficient (the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient was employed) of 0.993 for the pre-test, 0.997 for the post-test and 0.998 for the second post-test.

6. Although the outcomes from the pre- to the post-test for the non-CLIL group seem to point to a deterioration of this competence, no statistically significant within-group differences were detected with reference to the overall mark of the test (p = .339).

7. These possible causes and those mentioned in other headings are merely ventured based on our close work with and observation of both the experimental and control groups involved in the case study. However, without empirical substantiation, it cannot be claimed that they are the ones to which the linguistic competence differential can be ascribed. Further multivariate analyses (e.g. factor or discriminant analyses) would be necessary to make these claims, which we propose within the lines for future research section (cf. Conclusion).

8. Increased exposure to the language is a key trait of CLIL programmes in Andalusia, where this case study took place, both within the content and the language classes. They go hand in hand, together with a more student-centred, communicative approach to teaching (cf. Lancaster, 2016; Lorenzo et al., 2009). Thus, methodology and exposure are inextricably linked within CLIL, which is why they have been associated with this approach in the present study. CLIL does not only affect content subjects, but also language subjects, where a more oral focus, greater exposure to the FL, and a more communicative methodology are all favoured.

9. The results of the successive discriminant analyses carried out in the broader research projects within which this study has been conducted are now available. They have evinced that the independent variable (the CLIL programme) is the one which best explains the differences between the control and experimental groups for L2 learning. However, for L1 competence and content knowledge, it is verbal intelligence, motivation, context and socio-economic status which best discriminate between the groups. Interestingly, for content learning, exposure to English also has a significant weight in explaining the differences between the groups, especially at the end of Secondary Education (cf. forthcoming special issue of Porta Linguarum for the fine-grained results).

10. All these lines for future research are already being addressed via two longitudinal governmentally funded research projects (FFI2012-32221 and P12-HUM-2348 – cf. Funding), within which this case study is inserted.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness [grant number FFI2012-32221], and by the Junta de Andalucía [grant number P12-HUM-23480].