Abstract
The study targeted a group of 27 students at a college in Kuwait who were enrolled in a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) English course during the academic year 2015-2016. The purpose of the study was to monitor students’ assessments of their writing competence in English and to measure their attitudes toward the CLIL course. Data collection utilized a total of five focus-group interviews with the students which were recorded and transcribed, and a category system was generated to describe the commonalities in the participants’ responses. Additionally, an online survey using Google Forms was based on the categories delineated from the interview data. The Microsoft Excel program was used for counting the means, standard deviations, and percentages for each of the survey items. The results of the study indicated that the majority of the students (80%) thought that the CLIL course enhanced their writing competence both within and beyond the sentence level. Writing skills within the sentence level included the accurate use of punctuation marks and capitalization rules. Writing skills beyond the sentence level included paragraph organization, use of proper transition words, and writing cause-and-effect paragraphs. Approximately 20% of the students did not think CLIL improved their writing competence beyond the sentence level. Furthermore, the students displayed highly positive attitudes toward all aspects of the CLIL course. Implications were drawn for specialized teacher training to cope with the demands of CLIL courses, and longitudinal studies to track students’ development of writing competence over time.
Highlights
The introduction of the content and language integrated learning approach (CLIL) in the countries of the European Union was bound to influence other language teaching contexts in the world (Lasagabaster, 2008; Lasagabaster & Sierra, 2010; Meyer, 2010)
The results of the study indicated that the majority of the students (80%) thought that the Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) course enhanced their writing competence both within and beyond the sentence level
In a CLIL class, where students feel more invested in the learning task because the content resembles academic content they encounter in their major classes, it would be safe to assume that their attitudes will be more positive than if the content consisted of mostly abstract linguistic rules and semantic meanings
Summary
The introduction of the content and language integrated learning approach (CLIL) in the countries of the European Union was bound to influence other language teaching contexts in the world (Lasagabaster, 2008; Lasagabaster & Sierra, 2010; Meyer, 2010). The theoretical arguments proposed by Coyle, Hood, and Marsh (2010), and Dalton-Puffer (2011) went a long way to provide a convincing, common-sense rationale for the CLIL approach. When we as language teachers use the academic content the students are studying as the driving force of the content of our language classes, students will be more motivated to learn the content, and in the process, will be able to master more of the language as well. Another important dimension of the language learning process is affect. Arguments for the benefits of implementing CLIL were bolstered by policy-makers, teachers, and parents alike (Hüttner, Dalton-Puffer, & Smit, 2013; Gené-Gil, Juan-Garau, & Salazar-Noguera, 2015). De Zarobe (2013), for example, reviewed CLIL implementation as a ijel.ccsenet.org
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