UAM-CLIL research group

DisLitAs-CLIL

Students’ development of L2 disciplinary literacies and content and language integrated assessment in bilingual secondary schools across socio-economic areas (2023-2027)

Ana Llinares, Rachel Whittaker, Anne McCabe, Mick O’Donnell, Leah Tompkins, Nashwa Nashaat, Tom Morton, Elisa Hidalgo McCabe, Christiane Dalton-Puffer, Julia Hüttner, Aline Bieri, Alexander Hope, Irina Argüelles, Tarja Nikula, Elena del Pozo, Carmen Ortega Robles, Beatriz Antón

Ref. PID2022-140718OB-I00
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities

The main objective of this project is to evaluate the development of secondary school students’ L2
academic language production in disciplinary literacies.

Objectives

The main objective of this project is to evaluate the development of secondary school students’ L2 academic language production in disciplinary literacies.
More specifically, the present project will explore:

  1. students’ academic language for the expression of content.
  2. participants’ perspectives towards learning content subjects through a CLIL approach, primarily students’ motivation towards CLIL.
  3. classroom practices in relation to contextual and sociocultural factors and identifying scaffolding techniques that allow students to understand abstract and complex concepts in a foreign language.
  4. curriculum development drawing on integrated assessment and collaborative work between content teachers, language teachers and researchers.

Implications

Drawing on the team’s previous work, this project investigates to what extent the type of programme and the socioeconomic area have an impact on students’ L2 literacy development in bilingual schools. This carries implications for CLIL research, practice and policy.

  1. the representative overview of the students’ development of academic language competence.
  2. content and English teachers’ awareness of the language resources needed by students to succeed at school and beyond.
  3. the need to identify if bilingual education may provide advantages to underprivileged students.

Relation to previous UAM-CLIL projects

This proposal draws on two consecutive projects that focused specifically on the Comunidad de Madrid (CAM) Bilingual Education Programme: the TRANS-CLIL project (FFI2014-55590-R) and the
LongAd-CLIL project (RTI2018-094961-B-I00), funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and University. The DisLitAs-CLIL project introduces three main innovations:

  • The focus on a different context: the British Council/MEC Bilingual Programme.
  • The focus on the socioeconomic variable across schools participating in the Programme in Spain.
  • The incorporation of the Specialisation dimension together with the Semantics dimension from Maton’s (2013, 2014) Legitimation Code theory (LCT).