Students’ motivation for content and language integrated learning and the role of programme intensity

ABSTRACT

The study of motivation in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) contexts has hitherto one-sidedly been concerned with motivation to learn the foreign language, without regard for CLIL’s eponymous focus on the inextricable connection between language and content. To fill this gap, this article focusses on CLIL learners’ motivation not only towards the foreign language, but towards both content and language learning as an integrated construct, termed ‘CLIL motivation’. To this end, 157 secondary education students enrolled in two bilingual tracks of differing intensity (High- versus Low-intensity) were compared in terms of their CLIL motivation. The results show that participation in either the High- or Low-intensity track has a significant effect on both enjoyment of CLIL and the perception of its usefulness for future purposes. These differences are further discussed in terms of students’ foreign language proficiency and academic achievement.

KEYWORDS:

• CLIL
• motivation
• anxiety
• integration
• programme intensity
• secondary education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Trans-CLIL: Integrating and assessing content and language in the transition from primary to secondary bilingual education (FFI2014-55590-R).

2 The responses presented here are translations from the original Spanish.

3 Firstly, the non-parametric tests chosen are less sensitive to unequal sample sizes as they are not dependent on the Mean but instead look at differences in the ranked scores of each group. Secondly, the chance of a Type I error (‘false positive’) is not affected by unequal group size, but a Type II error (‘false negative’) is. This implies that whereas results that reject the null hypothesis are not at stake, results that retain the null hypothesis might be suspect.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Secretaría de Estado de Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación [grant number FFI2014-55590-R].

Notes on contributors

Thomas Somers

Thomas Somers is a junior researcher in the English department at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), where he is affiliated with the UAM-CLIL research group (uam-clil.org). Currently, he is preparing a doctoral dissertation in the field of applied linguistics, on the subject of academic language acquisition in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) classrooms.

Ana Llinares

Ana Llinares is Associate Professor in the English department at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM). She teaches second language acquisition and content and language integrated learning (CLIL), both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. She coordinates the UAM-CLIL research group (uam-clil.org) and has published widely on content and language integrated learning at primary and secondary school levels, mainly applying systemic functional linguistic models. She has co-authored the book The Roles of Language in CLIL, published by Cambridge University Press, and has recently co-edited the volume Applied Linguistics Perspectives on CLIL, published by John Benjamins.