Ana Llinares, Tom Morton
Assessment of content and language integrated learning (CLIL) students’ content and language academic performance is a pending issue in CLIL, particularly as disciplinary requirements (content and language) shape teachers’ expectations of what is acceptable or not in students’ expression of meanings, thus, making it difficult for teachers to share the same/similar assessment criteria. In this chapter, we focus on CLIL students’ expression of the cognitive discourse function (CDF) Explore. First, we analysed the same CLIL students’ realizations of the CDF Explore in English (L2) and Spanish (L1) in response to prompts eliciting this CDF in different disciplines; second, CLIL content and language teachers assessed students’ expressions of Explore individually using comparative judgement, where pairs of texts are compared and a final ranking of students’ texts (from the best valued to the worst valued) is generated; third, we analysed content and language teachers’ joint reflections on the results of their comparative judgements in a focus group seminar (also together with the researchers). The results show students’ fluency as well as challenges in the use of grammar resources in the expression of Explore. Interestingly, teachers’ judgements did not tend to focus on the specific language for the expression of Explore.
UAM-CLIL research group 