Writing Professional Genres in a Second Language: Results from a Spanish University Clil Context

Abstract

Bilingual educational programmes and projects have increased during the last few years and are currently being implemented in different Spanish universities through new teaching approaches such as CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) or EMI (English-Medium Instruction). Research conducted at university level reveal that university students often have difficulty in performing the cognitive and discursive operations involved in the comprehension and production of written texts. These difficulties aggravate when this written performance is conducted in a non-native language, which is being increasingly demanded to university students participating in CLIL programmes. In Higher Education, both lecturers and students belong to certain communities of knowledge and practice, thus the second language needs to be acquired considering the different genre types used in different subjects as products connected to particular fields of knowledge. The present study analyses the written production of a professional genre type by Engineering university students in a second language (English) at a Spanish university. Results show the relationship between their academic performance (content achievement) and their linguistic awareness of the genre produced in a second language, being the higher marked texts (in terms of content performance) those which show a better writing (language) performance. These differences are more remarkable at a textual and discourse level. Fewer differences between higher and lower-marked texts are found at a sentence level.