English-bilingual biology for standard classes development, implementation and evaluation of an English-bilingual teaching unit in standard German high school classes

ABSTRACT

English connects all areas of science around the world. Productive and receptive English-language skills are thus a crucial tool that schools must provide their students with in order to prepare them for higher education and professional life. The introduction of bilingual instruction of subject matter, often referred to as Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), allows for incorporating English as a medium of communication directly into the science classroom. However, such bilingual lessons are often only accessible in the context of bilingual programmes for which students have to qualify based on their previous performance. The present study assessed the applicability of bilingual modules in non-selected groups of students. For this, a bilingual teaching unit on immunology was developed and implemented in standard German ninth grade classes. After the unit, bilingually taught students showed the same content knowledge gains as their peers who had been taught solely in their native language. Average achievement motivation ratings before and after the unit were medium to high in all classes, and the majority of students was open to more bilingual lessons. An evaluation of student comments provides further indications for the development of future bilingual units.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingual science
• bilingual biology
• content and language integrated learning (CLIL)
• bilingual content learning
• bilingual instruction
• science language

Acknowledgements

This study is part of the Ph.D. dissertation of the corresponding author. We are grateful to the participating teachers and students for their cooperation, and to Prof. Dr. Margarete Imhof for her methodological advice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Nina Meyerhöffer http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6165-1275

Daniel C. Dreesmann http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9150-3871

Additional information

Funding

The present study is funded by the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Germany, through its Gutenberg Council for Young Researchers (GYR), Mainz, Germany.