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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.
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