The Impact of CLIL on Arabic, English and Content Learning of Arab High School Students in the UAE

Abstract

The present study investigated the impact of the Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) approach, as applied in a private school in the UAE, on students' L2 learning, L1 knowledge and content learning. It also analyzed secondary teachers' perspectives on the outcomes of CLIL programs regarding content and language learning. The first section of the study focuses on students' general language proficiency by examining one of their writing assignments in each language. First, the assignments were analyzed, to assess students' organization, vocabulary and language structure in English and Arabic writing skills. The second section focuses on students' academic performance reflected in the researcher' own rating as her grading in science (taught in English) and in social studies (taught in Arabic). Results revealed that the overall linguistic proficiency of the students in English was better than their proficiency in Arabic. The results also revealed a positive correlation between the students' academic achievement (content learning) and their linguistic proficiency in the language used in instruction. In addition, the lexical complexity analysis revealed that the students used a wide range of vocabulary and used more lexical words than function words in English compared to Arabic. Similarly, the syntactic analysis showed that students produced more coordinated clauses than subordinate clauses, thus inferring that structure did not benefit from the CLIL instruction. The third section presents teachers' responses to the questionnaire. The results showed that the majority of the participants felt that CLIL has a positive impact on L2 and content learning but were concerned about the negative impact of CLIL on the students' L1 knowledge.