The effect of intensity of content and language integrated learning programmes on students’ multilingual writing

Abstract

The study examines how the intensity of CLIL programmes and out of school activities influence students’ communicative appropriateness in writing from a multilingual perspective. It follows a mixed-method research approach, showing that there are not always significant differences between the intensity of CLIL programmes and students’ communicative appropriateness. Furthermore, our study demonstrates that exposure to television, private lessons, and short periods of time in the target language, considered as out-of-school activities, have an impact on English learning, with watching television being the main predictor. In the case of Catalan and Spanish, the study confirms that both watching TV and the language spoken at home influence students’ English writing, with the home language being the main predictor in Spanish and watching TV being the main predictor in Catalan. The study also confirms the positive effect of bilingualism on learning English and suggests some pedagogical implications to develop students’ communicative appropriateness in the context of multilingual education.