Testing progress on receptive skills in clil and non-clil contexts

Abstract

CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) has been reported to provide comprehension input which learners find challenging yet motivating. Thus, a potential boost to the so-called receptive skills (i.e. listening and reading comprehension) might be derived from CLIL, as the available literature demonstrates. However, comprehension has received less attention than production and hence needs to be further researched. Additionally, studies on how multilinguals acquire third or additional languages are still scarce. This chapter reports on the development of receptive skills in L3-English CLIL contexts. Informants are two groups (CLIL, N = 50; and non-CLIL, N = 37) of compulsory secondary education (CSE) students enrolled in state-run schools in the linguistically-diverse Balearic Islands. Their L3 comprehension development is measured upon their performance on two listening comprehension tests and two reading comprehension tests. All four tests were collected at four different times over a 3-year span: beginning (T1) and end (T2) of Year 2 of CSE, end of Year 3 (T3) and end of Year 4 (T4). Results point to the effectiveness of CLIL programmes in the overall development of receptive skills, most notably reading comprehension, with the learners’ language profile having no visible effect on results.