CLIL bilingual Research Results at Spanish University Level Including Academic Content Work

Abstract

This original empirical study looked into the results of one type of cross-disciplinary education begun in recent years in Spain. The latter country has a policy of bilingual or CLIL Content and Language Integrated Learning throughout its secondary schools (for example, Plan for Encouragement of Plural-lingualism: A linguistic policy for Andalusia: Andalusia Education Council, 2005). However, little research has been carried out on the efficacy of this system at secondary school, and much less on a follow up of these students at university level. The present study goes a long way into rectifying this as this research describes part of the results at university level found by a national r+d project (research and development) devised by, and awarded to, its current director the present author. The research project took data on the tracking and evaluation of students coming into higher education from bilingual secondary schools at the University of Granada. The participants in the initial phase of this research project were 31 Spanish-speaking university students of elective bilinguals. Within a pre-experimental design, over one academic year they completed one background questionnaire and four psychometric tests. Results are reported with Pearson correlations, and where necessary Kendall’s Tau Non-Parametric analysis for extra high confidence in the investigation. These revealed the areas where the participants’ independent subject variables were important. Coyle, Hood and Marsh (2010) came to the conclusion that research into bilingual CLIL Content and Language Integrated Learning, should also take data on the results of the academic content work as well as on linguistic outcomes in CLIL settings. Thus, I have collected information on both types in my empirical study reported in the second half of this article.