The Integration of Biology Content Lessons in the English Curriculum through

3. LITERATURE REVIEW
The area of teaching English as a Foreign Language to teenagers through a 
content subject, has been widely studied during the last two decades. It has been 
especially studied in the field of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), 
being bilingualism and bilingual education the most important issues to conduct a CLIL 
study. Some of the studies related to this area have been conducted by Henao and 
Ramirez (2014); and Linares and Pastrana (2013), which examine and analyze the 
implementation of CLIL in a Foreign Language Context. These works have been 
directed in schools located in a middle-socioeconomic area, of Spain and Colombia, 
with primary and secondary students, where formal instructions were provided in 
English. However, the focus of these studies differs since the first study was based on 
the improvement of teachers’ professional development while the second study was 

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focused on students’ pragmatic performance during the CLIL lessons. Each study will 
be further explained in this section. 
Henao and Ramirez (2014) conducted a study to analyze the effects of the 
implementation of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) in a dynamic 
bilingual education program, in two public Colombian schools. They took into 
consideration the background knowledge of students. In order to collect the data, the 
authors implemented three different methods to analyze the efficiency of the CLIL 
lessons implemented by the teachers who form part of the program called CHANGE. 
The first data collection method was conducted through observation, where three
observation formats were used, in order to gather information about teachers’ attitudes 
and behaviors when implementing the CLIL lessons. The second data collection method 
was based on reflective logs. In this case, teachers at the end of each CLIL lesson 
reflect on their own performance, as well as on students’ reactions, and things to 
improve. The third data collection method was carried out implementing interviews 
where, at the end of the implementation process, teachers share their experience during 
the program and provide thoughts to improve the project. This study concluded firstly, 
stating that content teachers need more training in L2 to have successful CLIL lessons, 
and at the same time English teachers need more training in content knowledge to get 
the same objective. Secondly, teachers present problems to identify when to use L1 and 
L2 during each lesson. Thirdly, it was proved that in order to have success in the 
project, students need to have background knowledge in the target language as well as 
in the content subject.

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Linares and Pastrana (2013) directed a project to examine the students’ 
pragmatic performance of communicative functions in CLIL classrooms. It was possible 
through the implementation of two different types of activities, which are group-work and 
whole-class discussions by
using the Communicative Language Teaching approach. 
This study was implemented with 156 students of primary (from 2
nd
grade to 5
th 
grade), 
and secondary (from 7
th
grade to 10
th
grade) of a school located in a middle-
socioeconomic area of Madrid, Spain. In order to gather and analyze the data, each 
group was divided in four group-work and three whole-class discussion, where they 
received formal instructions in English about geography and history. Thus, the topics 
vary according to the content they have received previously in class. The study 
concluded that it is necessary for CLIL teachers to be aware of the organization of 
diverse activities, which allows students to use the target language according to 
different purposes. Moreover, this study shows that primary and secondary students 
performed an extensive diversity of different functions in group-work rather than in 
whole-class discussion. 
The studies previously cited permit to evidence that if the students’ context and 
needs are identify, they will develop their language skills as well as their content 
knowledge when they are exposed to CLIL methodology. It seems that CLIL based 
English instruction affects the way the students use English in the classroom since it 
goes beyond than only communication, but to think about the content topic by the use of 
the additional language. The findings of these works are aligned to Marsh’s theory 
(2001), which states that CLIL methodology will help students’ motivation to have 
bidirectional learning referring to the content and language. This can be supported by 

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selecting accurately activities that help students to be motivated, in order to face the 
regular content in a foreign language.