Assessing Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL): Linguistic, cognitive and educational perspectives

Meunier, Fanny [UCL] Van Goethem, Kristel [UCL] Galand, Benoît [UCL]

Assessing Dutch and English immersion in French-Speaking Belgium: linguistic, cognitive and educational perspectives Our paper aims to present and illustrate the methodological approach that will be adopted in a very recently funded 5-year multidisciplinary research project on immersion in French-speaking Belgium. Our project starts from the postulate that although recently published surveys have confirmed that immersion learners outperform traditional L2 learners as far as target language test scores are concerned, it nonetheless remains largely unclear how much, in what respect and thanks to which (internal and external) processes/factors immersion students are better than traditional learners (see Dalton-Puffer 2011). Thanks to the innovative combination of different research methods and perspectives, our project will tackle underinvestigated facets of immersion, viz. spoken skills and oral proficiency in (semi-)authentic interactions, lexical and morpho-syntactic knowledge, cognitive abilities and socio-affective variables. The project thus tackles the interplay between linguistic, cognitive and educational aspects of immersion. This interdisciplinary approach will allow us to examine by which cognitive [memory, attention…] and socio-affective [motivational, attitudinal…] factors the potential linguistic [typological, cross-linguistic…] differences between immersion learners of Dutch and of English can be accounted for (see for instance Bialystok and Barac 2012 and Katarzyna 2012). We will analyse data from French-speaking immersion and non-immersion learners (control group) of English and Dutch as target languages in the last two years of primary school education, but also in the last two years of secondary school education. Regarding the methodological approach, we will adopt an innovative combination of corpus-based longitudinal and cross-sectional analyses, together with experimental research designs. A longitudinal learner corpus will be collected, annotated and analysed, detailed sociolinguistic and attitudinal questionnaires collected, classroom observations carried out; and focus groups studies will also be performed (set of controlled tasks and individual interviews). Dalton Puffer, C. (2011), Content-and-Language Integrated Learning: From Practice to Principles? in: Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 31, 182–204. Bialystok, E. & Barac, R. (2012). Emerging bilingualism: Dissociating advantages for metalinguistic awareness and executive control. Cognition, 122, 67-73. Katarzyna P. (2012). ‘The impact of students’ attitude on CLIL: A study conducted in higher education’. In: Latin American Journal of Content and Language Integrated Learning 5(2), 28-56