Investigating CLIL textbooks in Spanish Primary Education (original) (raw)

Abstract

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is a dual-focused educational approach in which attention is given to both the topic and the language of instruction in an attempt to lead students to authentic learning (Marsh, 2013). Although meaning is prioritized over form, CLIL favours scaffolding as a pedagogical principle to provide temporary explicit form-focused support or language awareness when students find it problematic to understand and produce content through the target language (Coyle, Hood & Marsh, 2010). Thus, the language-focused part is ruled by the demands of the content of the specific subject targeted at. Despite the substantial implementation of CLIL in all stages of education, commercially available materials are scarce (Morton, 2016) and there are hardly any works on CLIL textbook content analysis (but see Banegas, 2014). Taking into account that a) textbooks are an essential (if not the most basic) tool in any teachers’ pedagogical repertoire (Guerrettaz & Johnston, 2013; Tomlinson, 2012), b) teachers are demanding suitable well-designed CLIL materials (Morton, 2013), and c) to the best of our knowledge, there are not any available works about content analyses of CLIL textbooks used in Spain, the present paper reports an exploratory study about CLIL course books used in the context of Spanish Primary Education. Its aims are 1) to objectively measure whether the activities are form-focused or meaning-focused and the degree of both weights, and 2) similar to Banegas (2014), to examine the activities in terms of the skills they are mostly targeted at, the thinking skills involved and the types of texts used as a support. Methodologically, a convenient corpus was selected on the basis of the free availability of CLIL materials on the Internet (http://clil.santillana.es/catalogue/primary). Accordingly, all the activities (193) from one unit of each of the six course levels of the Natural Sciences subject are the object of analysis. In order to fulfil the first objective, Criado's (2017) scale of Form-focused and Meaning-focused Teaching was used. This scale had shown very satisfactory concurrent criterion validity (r ranged between .991 and .876). Likewise, Carrasco’s approach to segment the activities according to the different objectives involved in a single activity prior to the analysis was used. For the second objective, an ad-hoc checklist and coding scheme were designed and implemented. Interrater reliability scores (each author analysing the same 20% of the activities) were over 80% for the three sets of analyses. Statistical analyses will be applied to the data.Preliminary descriptive results show that most activities are lexically form-focused and that these mainly involve a matching procedure or the use of drills. Instances of language forms appear to be presented via colourful pictures (one form of scaffolding) or ininput-enriched written texts about which students must answer short literal comprehension questions. Globally, such results point to the exclusive development of L2 lexical declarative knowledge and reading skills, which, together with the two other skills and remaining linguistic elements, should (ideally) be reinforced in the regular EFL classes (Lyster, 2017). Cognitive, pedagogical and teacher-development implications will be drawn.

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