Educational outcomes in multilingual CLIL school settings: A systematic review

Thesis

This systematic review aims to assess the spread and effectiveness of multilingual school programs that integrate the teaching of academic content knowledge and language. With multilingualism as a growing reality across the globe, such educational models represent a promising option for supporting the development and vitality of majority and minority languages alike. As such, there is a critical need for an evaluation of the outcomes of multilingual programs.

A total of 19 studies were identified by the search, with the majority of studies coming from secondary schools in Spain. Mirroring the results from bilingual school programs, the included studies reported positive outcomes for attitudes and target language development, without any associated costs for the L1 or academic content knowledge.

Though a risk of bias assessment revealed that the group of studies possesses a moderate strength of evidence as a whole, the findings have severely limited generalizability, given the dearth of studies conducted outside of Spanish secondary schools. Nonetheless, analogous patterns between bilingual and multilingual programs and initial findings from the limited studies conducted outside of Spain provide tentative indications that multilingual school programs may be a fruitful avenue forward for developing competence in several languages at no expense to academic performance.

Multilingualism is a trend rapidly developing worldwide, and educational models and research must keep pace with this reality; future research must build on the current body of work and assess the effectiveness of multilingual programs in a broader variety of global contexts.

Authors: Richter, KW

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-kepkzqky8
• Type of award: MSc taught course
• Level of award: Masters
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: ALSLA; Multilingual; Education; Mixed methods research; Immersion; Content and language integrated learning / CLIL; Systematic review; ALSLA2021
• Subjects: Applied linguistics; Mixed methods research; Multilingual persons; Education