The cognitive profile of children enrolled in Content and Language Integrated Learning in French-speaking Belgium
(2019)
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- In an era of growing internationalization, Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is increasingly promoted by policies as an efficient educational method to foster bilingualism. Although this method of foreign-language acquisition is gaining in popularity, key fundamental questions about the cognitive effects and implications of CLIL are intensively debated by international scientific researchers, policy makers and different educational stakeholders. The first goal of this thesis was to examine whether CLIL pupils successfully attain the two main educational objectives of CLIL education, which are proficiency in multiple languages and acquisition of content knowledge. Do the foreign-language gains expected from CLIL emerge and do they arise without loss of oral and written language proficiency in the main school language? Do CLIL pupils achieve comparable levels of academic content knowledge compared to non-CLIL pupils who acquired content through the main school language? The second goal of this thesis was related to the broader nonverbal cognitive implications of CLIL education. CLIL is a highly cognitive demanding context in which pupils constantly have to manage multiple languages. Therefore, this thesis also falls within the debate related to the cognitive control advantages often associated with bilingualism. Through large-scale studies, we demonstrated that the two main educational goals of CLIL education are successfully attained by CLIL pupils in French-speaking Belgium. CLIL fosters foreign language knowledge without loss on the main school language and CLIL pupils successfully achieve their curriculum with comparable levels of academic content knowledge as non-CLIL pupils. Finally, other nonverbal cognitive benefits, like cognitive control advantages, could not be observed in our samples. Overall, CLIL in French-speaking Belgium is a story of significant cognitive gains, with virtually no measurable losses.
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Simonis, M. (2019). The cognitive profile of children enrolled in Content and Language Integrated Learning in French-speaking Belgium. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/62030