CLIL for the teaching of History and English in Secondary Education: how to complete the existing materials

Alberto Ángel Vela Rodrigo

vela@unizar.es

University of Zaragoza, Spain

ABSTRACT

The importance of CLIL can be understood by the new demands in education and the changing social forces that affect the use of languages in applied contexts today. Therefore, the use of appropriate materials is basic. The aim of this paper is two-fold. Firstly, to establish the key elements of CLIL, reviewing the theoretical frameworks informing this methodology to identify its basic characteristics. Secondly, to examine to what extent they are applied in the teaching of History through a real example of a textbook for 2nd year of Secondary Education. To fulfil both aims, a list of nine criteria has been developed to be used as a relevant tool for teachers when choosing potentially effective materials. This tool will be inspired in the guidelines of two CLIL models in terms of SLA and content support. Finally, possible niches for improvement will be detected, always in order to increase students’ motivation.

Keywords: CLIL; Secondary Education; History; SLA; textbook.

1. INTRODUCTION

In an increasingly globalized and interdependent world, multilingualism stands as an articulating element of society, which means that its role in school will be key when it comes to training new citizens of the future (Graddol, 2006). In this context the development of communicative competences becomes a priority in teaching. Therefore, Content & Language Integrated Learning (henceforth CLIL) research has become the centre of attention since it exceeds the mere acquisition of a language and allows the student to develop communication skills, also facilitating subsequent learning (Marsh, 1994; Marsh et al., 2001; Ball et al., 2015). In fact, CLIL is intended to prepare students to cope with a changing world and to help them develop a sense of global citizenship, having experiences which they could not have had in a monolingual setting (Ball et al., 2016). However, this methodology can be a cognitive challenge for both students and teachers. The first are expected to develop their basic interpersonal communication skills and their competence in cognitive-academic language, expanding their facets of thinking (Coyle et al., 2010) while teachers have too much to pay attention to in the classroom: timing, teaching methodology, presenting content, language attention, class management, etc. Consequently, counting on an appropriate text-book, which is well designed according to CLIL parameters, can facilitate the teacher’s labour but also students’ performance. The aim of this paper is two-fold. Firstly, to establish the key elements of CLIL methodology. Secondly, to examine to what extent they are applied in a coursebook for History used in CLIL- learning today in a particular school in Aragon (Spain) and to suggest improvements, when possible, in regard to certain deficiencies detected. This study allows to analyse this learning model and its methodology and to examine how it is being addressed for the teaching of History today. Namely, to critically examine real materials with the intention of analysing their contents and to know whether they allow to deal with concepts, language and procedures at different levels or not. This way it will be possible to grade the adequacy of the tasks for CLIL teaching and decide how to enrich this book for the development of specific competences in the subject of History. It is also planned to shed more light on how CLIL meets SLA requirements and how content can be supported. Furthermore, attention will be turned to teachers’ opportunities to guide their students in the process of learning History in a second language, so they can perceive English not as an added difficulty but as a vehicle of getting access to extra knowledge and resources. For all that, a 9-criteria research tool will be designed and applied to the analysis of book activities, reserving a special space for those criteria that seek to focus on motivation specially.

1. LITERATURE REVIEW

The importance of CLIL and the great interest around it can be understood by the new demands in education and the changing social and economic forces that affect the use of languages in applied contexts today (Vollmer, 2006). We live in an increasingly globalized society in which economic and social exchanges have a significant impact on the learning of English as lingua franca, which is conceived as a difficult mission by many educational systems around the world. In fact, the European Union policies even advocate the use and command of two other languages apart from the native one (reflected in the 22nd May 2019 Council of Europe Recommendation) what has driven CLIL to be seen as one of the most appropriate tools to achieve this objective in the fastest way.

CLIL is defined as a dual-focused educational approach in which and additional language, such as English in this case, serves as a vehicular tool for learning and teaching both content and language (Ball et al., 2016, p. 5) These two components are interrelated, even if a deeper attention is put on one or another at a specific time. That is to say, CLIL is not a new form of language education but a fusion of content and language learning in an innovative way, overcoming the mere teaching of a subject in English. It is then an educational dual-focused approach that uses several foreign language methodologies to serve the teaching of specific subject content in a second language. As Eurydice, the European publisher and descriptor of national education systems, indicated in 2006, “this two-fold aims calls for the development of a special approach to teaching a subject with the support of a foreign language and not despite a foreign language” (p. 6). The term CLIL was adopted in 1991 within the European Educational Space context to describe and design good practice in different school bilingual environments where learning and teaching were developed in a second language (Marsh et al., 2001). But CLIL is much more than bilingual education, because it enables learners to master specific language terminology and prepares them for future studies/working life through the support for formal and informal language and cognition (Harmer, 1991; Coyle et al., 2010; Ball et al., 2016). This way, CLIL is pursuing the acquisition of a wide range of subject competences (valuable for the learning of History, for example) and at the same time the improvement of a second language. But since content has always involved language and vice versa, the interest in CLIL lies on the interpretation of the word ‘integration’, which indicates the teacher is responsible providing language support and scaffolding cognition.

II.1. What CLIL model do we use?

CLIL in Aragon is regulated by the BRIT-Model in Order ECD/823/2018, of 18th May. This model of Linguistic Competence of and in Foreign Languages must respond to the training needs of students with the aim of favouring and develop the necessary communicative competence in foreign languages to reach the B2 level of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages at the end of compulsory schooling. Since CLIL is always content-driven, it involves different models which can be applied in a variety of ways with diverse kind of learners. Perhaps one of the most well-known is the 4 Cs Model (Coyle et al., 2010), which is a pedagogical approach based on four components: Content, Communication, Cognition and Culture. This model builds on the synergies of integrating learning (cognition and content) and language learning (communication and cultures). According to this model and referring to Content, students learn an academic subject through an additional language support and they have communication as the central point of content and cognition. For fostering Communication, students receive language instruction, such as specific vocabulary support, although the syllabus is not language oriented.

CLIL practitioners must also consider Cognition when planning a learning sequence: the instruction must develop critical thinking, which is possible providing texts and activities for students to reflect and answer questions that imply a reasoning process. Bloom’s Taxonomy is normally used to identify different levels of critical thinking since cognition is referred to the higher order and lower order thinking skills. Those levels of critical thinking are classified into levels of complexity and specificity, according to cognitive, affective and sensory domains (Bloom & Krathwohl, 1956). Learning at higher levels depends on the acquisition of knowledge and skills of certain lower levels. On the other hand, to work cultural aspects students are encouraged to see themselves as citizens of the world, so they can develop an international awareness and global understanding of History (Guerrero Muñoz, 2014, p. 232). Nevertheless, there is not a single way of meeting and teaching CLIL. Other authors developed their own model based on the difficulty of the tasks. The Competency model (Ball et al., 2016) is focused basically on planning contents, language and procedures at different levels in order to grade the difficulty of the tasks. This way, language and contents are both a vehicle for the development of specific competences in every subject. The intellectual challenge of CLIL implies a cognitive integration that combines different types of knowledge: factual, conceptual, and procedural. One way of integrating these three dimensions consists on using learning tasks, designing our instruction around them and assessing students according to the results they get after working on them (Ellis, 2003; Marsh, 2009; Ball et al., 2016). This concept of task comes from the teaching-learning process for foreign languages, in which tasks are presented as a tool for learning and a way to converge with the curriculum (Vollmer, 2006). To design a task for CLIL can seem a difficult work, but it is possible to do it in a very similar way we design a task for an EFL classroom (Ellis, 2003). Moreover, in CLIL, any task will have a triple projection in three different dimensions: they will teach conceptual content, by means of procedural choices (Ball et. al., 2016) but using specific language from the discourse content. So, content, procedure and language will have to be considered as an integrated type of content, that is, a means to an end, which is that of developing specific competences for the History area. For this reason, content, procedure and language will have to be taken into account when both designing tools and planning priorities (Llinares & Whittaker, 2009).

There are different ways of conceptualizing these mentioned three dimensions. Ball et al. (2016) proposed a model using the example of a mixing desk. The CLIL teacher will have to regulate the different difficulty factors in a task in every moment of the didactic sequence, also choosing to which dimension he/she gives priority depending on the learning objectives. The dimension with the highest volume is the dimension that the teacher makes the most relevant. This model is valid for fine-tuning evaluation but also for designing tasks and estimating their difficulty, in a similar way the Cummins matrix does: used to measure the combination of cognitive and linguistic levels of the different tasks of a unit (Cummins, 1984).

II.2. CLIL meeting and supporting SLA

The use of language in CLIL is basically connected with most of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) requirements for L2 learning. Therefore, it will be necessary to pay attention to the input guidance and to interaction, without forgetting output must be comprehensible while focusing on form and giving feedback to students. CLIL teachers first need to identify/establish the language of the subject, being aware of what types of language occur in each lesson at three different levels: there is a language related to the subject area (in History we could think of the term ‘regime’); another is crosscurricular, referred to as general academic language (for example, ‘It’s a type of political institution which…), and finally, there is language that forms the speech of the classroom, what we could call the ‘interactional language’ of communication, also known as ‘peripheral language’ (Lozanov, 1978). Following with an example in History we could say this is a subject which moves learners away from the ‘here and now’, that is to say, look back in time to establish ties and connections with the present (Coyle, 1999; Phillips, 2008) (Obj.GH.5 of the Aragonese curriculum (AC) for 2º ESO: “Identify and locate in time and space the relevant historical processes and events in the history of the world, Europe, Spain and Aragon to acquire a global perspective of the evolution of Humanity”) (BOA no. 105, June 2 2016, p. 12870). That is, there is a defect focusing on the past that influences discourse relating in the teaching and learning of the subject (Phillips, 2008). The kind of language needed for History (historical terms, proper nouns, titles, foreign words, speculative statement, passive, language of inference and uncertainty…) will drive to a key aspect in this matter: the need for the History teacher talk to create hypothetical questions as a common aspect of the discourse and also as a challenge for non-native learners of English (Ball et al., 2016). There are authors that go further on this questioning. For Assor et al. (2005) these questions should not just appear during the class or when reading theoretical explanations in the textbook, there should also be a space at the beginning of the class to ask previous-knowledge questions and talk about what students already know, including hypothesis. Learners will always have some prior understanding of the new learning and some idea of what language to use to express their initial ideas, however undeveloped. So, it is important to be aware of the fact that learners dealing with new content need to be able to express their basic comprehension of the content before they can develop their understanding further (Assor et al., 2005). We can then begin to look at the scaffolding and instruments to provide input at this discovery stage assisting students in gradually broadening their understanding of content through the L2 (models, full scripts, word clouds, KWL charts, jigsaw tasks, etc.) (Roth, 2005; Ball et al., 2016). The idea is to provide students with a ‘message of abundancy’ in order to make the discourse comprehensible (Gibbons, 2005).

Another key point is how to present input in an efficient way. A CLIL teacher will have to guide learners in their learning process of the subject and through the lesson input demands. These refer to listening, watching and reading skills required to complete a task in an L2. For example, the difficulty of understanding the discourse of the teacher is much higher when faster spoken language is present. The same happens with understanding written texts, something that is usually more challenging when long sentences with multiple clauses occur. These factors can make the process of decoding the message and arriving at the correct meaning difficult for learners, particularly in L2, so the teacher need to adapt input according to the necessities of the class. Moreover, we must remember that, as classroom based, SLA research evidences, although learners may already know the language rules, this does not mean they are able to use them in communicative interaction (Lightbrown, 2000). Therefore, a CLIL teacher must improve the input buy different techniques, which can be applied according to their learners’ necessities. As an example, they could use bold letters, underlining, or italics to highlight specific formulas used in a subject such as History or set sentences, employing similar techniques as those for teaching SLA, so students can use them both in written and oral sentences (Smith, 1993). Furthermore, authentic materials (Obj.GH.9. of the AC: “Search, select, understand and relate verbal, graphic, iconic, statistical and cartographic information, coming from diverse sources, including historical sources […] media and information technologies”) (BOA no. 105, June 2 2016, p. 12870) can also help a CLIL teacher to support content by bringing the characteristics of real-world speech into the classroom, so information become comprehensible and the vocabulary of the subject closer to the learner in this decoding process. But CLIL can also offer ‘authenticity of response’ and ‘interaction’ somehow in the sense historians also read a text about a certain topic and a discussion follows (Obj.GH.10 of the AC: “Carry out collaborative tasks, research projects and debates about the current social reality with a constructive, critical and tolerant attitude, adequately substantiating opinions and valuing dialogue, negotiation and decision making”) (BOA no. 105, June 2 2016, p. 12870-12871). This is precisely what historians normally do, so CLIL students would practice an ‘authentic’ or real type of speech in which academic and formal vocabulary would be openly discuss and decode and therefore would get closer and help content to be understood (Richards 2006, p. 20). Learners also need to get access to comprehensible input and models of new language through the same information in a variety of ways (what is known as multimodality), so they can fix new content and internalize the new vocabulary associated (Krashen, 1982). But there can be some reluctance if students still do not feel familiar with the new vocabulary. To use L1 can be useful in these cases, especially when approaching a new topic for the first time. L1 could have a support function for explanation but could also have a learning function, as it can help to build up lexicon and to foster students’ metalinguistic awareness (Ball et al., 2016).

Regarding to interaction, there must be a mediation or vehicular language between the learner and new knowledge, “with the teacher scouring input content” (Ball et al., 2016, p. 48). This way, the teacher can provide examples of language and vocabulary looking out the learners’ production and feeding their observation in terms of output, as well as giving the necessary scaffolding. This principle would be directly connected to the Obj.GH.8 of the AC: (“Acquire and use the specific vocabulary and the notions of causality, change and permanence that Geography and History contribute so that their incorporation into the usual vocabulary increases precision in the use of language and improves communication”, (BOA no. 105, June 2 2016, p. 12870)), which pursues to increase precision in the use of language and therefore to improve communication (Crit.GH.3.17). CLIL sessions normally need to be communicative. Students usually first get confidence through speaking about a specific subject and they will not be totally convinced that they understand a concept until they have expressed it in their own words. This is a crucial observation on the relationship between self-expression and cognitive development. So, if we accept this principle, then CLIL teachers need to encourage and promote oral interaction in their classrooms, which requires creating an affective environment in order to encourage learners to interact in the L2 (Ball et al., 2016). This way, CLIL learners need to rethink language having opportunities to use ‘stretched language’: the language produced by situations where they need struggle to make themselves understood in a foreign language, moving out of their comfort zone (Swain, 1985). Therefore, people learn a language by noticing when it is used incorrectly. If noticing happens, the learners then correct themselves and can use language making use of the grammatical rules for increased accuracy and precision. As previous studies have also indicated: “sometimes, under some conditions, output facilitates second language learning in ways that are different form, or enhance, those of input” (Swain & Lapkin, 1995, p. 371). That is, students’ self-production when communicating can help them notice their own limits and lacks. They will look for correction within their own resources, not just centred on the received input. Nevertheless, to provide students with content knowledge and enhance L2 proficiency, it is also necessary to focus on form within CLIL lessons, so that integration of both content and language is effectively carried out. Most CLIL lessons are sometimes too communicative, since lessons tend to draw attention primarily to meaning and negotiation of meaning, “leaving language apart and using it as a mere vehicle to communicate and not as a goal itself” (Pérez-Vidal, 2007, p. 51). Eventually, this will negatively affect learner output. In order to prevent this and help learners to focus on form, it is necessary to require them to produce comprehensible output, at the same time as teachers provide negative feedback (Mariotti, 2006).

Another important aspect to consider is the question of assessment and the type of CLIL system to be implemented: soft CLIL or hard CLIL (Ball et al., 2016). Soft CLIL is ‘language led’, so the assessment measures will need to reflect this. The problem lies on how far language teachers should go in their content-based extension. On the contrary, in hard CLIL it is no possible to talk about assessing the language, given the subject-based objectives and overall aims of the curriculum. Normally, the process-led tendencies of CLIL give more importance to the practice of continuous and formative assessment and just look at the aspect of the language particularity in CLIL-based summative testing, identifying the ways in which teachers can warrant fairness for learners being assessed in L2 (Ball et al., 2016). Considering our educational environment, we will have to consider the Brit-Aragón regulation, which says language should only be valued and assess positively, a legal aspect that can interfere in the idea of Mariotti (2006), previously cited, of providing negative feedback as a way to ensure learner’s output. This does not mean that teachers should not evaluate it, but they cannot penalize students for their faults. The Order ECD/65/2015, of 21st January, which describes the relationships between competencies, content and evaluation criteria, indicates that to evaluate complex content, complex tools have to be used. This is the essence of CLIL: the presence of competency contents (Chadwick, 2012; Ball et al., 2016). An option to assess in CLIL is the use of rubrics, preserving a room for language as the only real transversal component which is common to all subject areas and competences and leaving the rest for contents, being both the vehicles for developing the curricular competences.

1. METHODS

To achieve the mentioned aims, literature research was first carried out among the existing materials for CLIL, as well as consulting online resources through Europeana (the European Digital Library). A deep reading of the materials selected was necessary having into account the RD 1105 2014 on the Basic Curriculum for Secondary Education and its application in Aragon through the Order ECD/489/2016, of 26th May. This allowed to know exactly the main assessment criteria, aims and competences for History in the Second Year of Compulsory Secondary Education. The analysed textbook is History, Series Explore, - 2º ESO (History, 2017) and it is divided into nine units, covering each one a different period of the universal History from the early Middle Ages to the Baroque. The book is reinforced with a final glossary of useful historical terms and an appendix for Romanesque and Gothic architecture and arts. It also reserves a two-page initial area to introduce the structure of its lessons and activities, showing pictures and terms that are developed next to the main text in order to reinforce input. All units of the book follow one same structure: two introductory pages with large pictures and questions to activate previous knowledge and a text box where to read the aims of the lesson. Next, the book develops its content in English as any other textbook would do in Spanish, with activities on the sidelines. Every unit finishes with four pages for extra exercises to deepen knowledge. Further, a close examination on a specific unit was chosen to center the research (Unit 9: Baroque Europe). This unit pursues to reach the last two contents of Block 3 from the Aragonese Curriculum for History in 2º ESO: “The 17th century in Europe: authoritarian, parliamentary and absolute monarchies. The Thirty Years War, the Austrians and their policies: Felipe III, Felipe IV and Carlos II / Baroque art: main manifestations of the culture of the 16th and 17th centuries” (BOA no. 105, June 2 2016, p. 12870-12871). Contents also fit assessment criteria Crit. GH.3.14., Crit. GH. 3.15, Crit. GH.3.16 and Crit. GH.3.17. (1)

All the activities of the lesson were examined and classified one by one according to their nature: activities to work individually, activities to work in groups, activities suitable for both modalities, activities for activating previous knowledge, multimodality activities and activities to support language. The niches detected, as well as the deficiencies and shortcomings in the lesson for the application of the CLIL methodology helped to establish a list of 9 analytical criteria for teachers to use as a tool when facing the election of a textbook (See Table 1). The choice of these criteria could seem somewhat arbitrary at first glance because it does not follow any specific CLIL model. Nevertheless, it introduces specific proposals for application in order to cover the main aspects of the Competency Model (Ball et al., 2016), namely, contents, language and procedures (in order to grade the difficulty of the tasks at different levels), as well as the areas of content and communication support of the 4 C’s model (Coyle et al., 2010). Once finished the design of the criteria list, all activities were examined again looking for those which meet any or several of the table criteria, reflecting the number and page of the activity. With all the information collected results and conclusions were finally addressed. This tool is intended to be relevant and applicable to any material analysis to be done in the subject of History for CLIL contexts. It has been tried that the criteria serve to know whether the activities meet SLA necessities and they support language and content acquisition. When possible, a proposal for improvement is also presented in the results section.

1. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The process of acquiring a new content in History with a CLIL methodology seeks to integrate content and language. Therefore, SLA support will be crucial to implement a CLIL methodology adequately. In this section an analysis of the activities presented in the chosen unit will help to grade the accomplishment of this two-fold aim. For this, the table of criteria designed will be used with the intention of filling the gaps that the book itself may present.

III.1. How CLIL is this unit? Analysing activities through the 9-criteria tool

One of the main aspects of providing language support is the analysis of the cognitive and language demands of units and materials. Students will have to pay attention to and follow the sequence of ideas in the presentation of the topic, giving importance to the signals the teacher uses to make the organization of the discourse clear. They will also need to learn some new vocabulary and to use it along with the necessary grammar to perform specific communicative functions when talking in groups. To achieve all this, the teacher can talk in a way that helps students to understand, by graduating the difficulty according to the student and allowing them to use L1 in a strategic way, when necessary, in order to rethink content. This idea of paying attention to language and to rethink is closely connected to Crit. 1 of the proposed criteria tool: Learners get opportunities to use ‘stretched language’ (Gibbons, 2005, p. 26) with moments of struggle that push them to rethink (Swain, 2000). For that, activities such as n. 2 from p. 157 and n. 1 from p. 158 force students to make a reinterpretation of the language they have seen in the theoretical body (See Figure 1). They need to look at the pictures of the domestic system and jobs and to produce their own message after answering the proper questions. They also need to search for information to reinterpret it when writing a biography of a valido in 17th century. The first case would also be connected to Crit. 4. Content promote work in groups and pairs to use extended language (Gibbons, 2005, p. 32).

As for Crit. 3 SS get opportunities to build on the resources of their mother tongue, using L1 in a strategic way, (Gibbons, 2015, p. 24) there are no activities in the unit oriented this manner, as it could be an introductory activity that allows them to investigate the historical context in advance. Thus, they could seek for information in their mother tongue (Spanish in this case) on the Internet or in libraries. The most appropriate activity in the textbook to meet this criterion is placed at the beginning of the unit and is entitled Find out About: students must investigate some terms without any specific pattern (e.g., the scientific revolution, the Spanish Golden Age, etc.). The unit starts with an attempt of previous knowledge activation through questions that foster reflection, which is not exclusive of the CLIL methodology but of tasks in general. In fact, CLIL is nothing new. It draws on principles and procedures that are associated with the communicative approach and meaningful learning. At any rate, there are some specific positive aspects of the unit which has little to do with the proposed criteria tool but that are important for content presentation too. This is the appropriate use of appealing pictures the book does, which are very visual and descriptive. Some of them present content support through language definitions or indications with arrows nearby (e.g., introductory pages and pp. 166, 168, 169) (See Figure 2 and Figure 3).

Iconic descriptors such as dialogue balloons, keys, stairs or CD’s drawings are used to indicate the nature of every activity, which also helps target learners to understand how to proceed. The same effect is produced by the use of schemas and diagrams, which make content easier at first glance (p. 158-159 with the lives of the Habsburgs and most relevant facts in their time, or p. 163 where we find the political system of the United Provinces after their treason to the Spanish Crown). But all this visual support has very little to do with CLIL methodology specifically, since they are common to any kind of activities available in most of text books from any subject of today. It would be more oriented towards CLIL if they introduced multimodality in presenting input. Apart from diagrams, activities could give links to videos (authors could create their own videos, images or extended exercises with interactive maps in a CD annexed). This way they could make input comprehensible (Krashen, 1982) and even clarify the context of the Baroque through film recommendation. For this period of History there are relevant, informative films they could watch in English with/without subtitles such as Barry Lyndon (1975), Caravaggio (1986) or The man in the iron mask (1998). Subtitling them in L2 would serve also for enhancing input.

A key aspect in CLIL is the support and active participation of the teacher in the learning and teaching process, both presenting content and providing scaffolding for content and language when necessary. None of the activities of the unit has been designed to work with the teacher together, but to work individually or in groups of students, considering the teacher as a mere controller (Harmer, 1991). The unit meets the curriculum content and assessment criteria, but it is very far from meeting CLIL requirements. Many speaking activity types would be possible to fill this blank. As an example, we can consider to read articles from historical magazines aloud and to ask for instructions among groups in order to design a final poster. To organize role-playing specific subject scenarios (for example, a dialogue between a doctor from the 17th century and one of the 21st century) or to ask open and closed questions from teacher to class and from student to student (about the consequences of a population growth in the past and now) can also be useful. As far as Crit. 2. is concerned (materials give access to comprehensible input and models of new language through the same information in a variety of ways (multimodality) Krashen, 1982), new language (especially new terminology) is introduced within the main text through the use of bold letters and italics. Another way of presenting vocabulary in the book is through the use of arrows and terminology within a bubble next to a picture, that is to say, annotated visuals (pp. 166 and 172). Nevertheless, this activity does not meet criteria 1 and 2, since input and vocabulary are only presented in one same way instead of using other techniques, such as information gaps, speaking frames, videos, word lists, substitution tables or sentence starters for learners to complete.

III.2. Activities and motivation: engaging students

Questioning can be very positive in CLIL-oriented activities since it stimulates learners’ interest and thinking. However, to make questioning effective, we have to give students time to think; we must handle wrong answers assertively; and, finally, we need to help students to understand that wrong answers are always opportunities to learn. The activities of this unit present several questioning proposals in groups, especially at the introductory pages, but most questions are designed to be answered individually. Activities need to be more communicative, that is, more oriented towards a task-type model, in order to create a warm ambience in which to discuss (Crit.6). Here, opportunities to use a ‘stretched language’ (as indicated in Crit. 1) will come up and the teacher will be able to provide scaffolding to content, language and learning skills (to fulfil Crit. 5: Materials foster cognitive fluency through the scaffolding of content, language and learning skills, Ball et al., 2015, p. 196). Namely, students could give explanations to the topics proposed. For example, they could offer their vision about the Palace of Versailles in p. 155 or express personal attitudes towards the people’s ways of life living in the palace. They also can expose disadvantages or advantages of absolutism in that time, likes and dislikes, or how to link this palace to similar constructions they have visited in Spain or any other country. This would promote the use of functional language, that is, what students need in different daily situations, integrating all language skills. On the other hand, Crit. 6 (Activities need to be attractive to increase students’ motivation (Dörnyei, 1994, p. 281)) can encompass all the activities in the unit, and possibly the whole textbook. Activities are not as attractive as they could be, especially considering all the digital media and resources available nowadays. Along the unit, it has been observed that there are some activities which consist on listening to CDs or searching information on the Internet (introductory exercise on page 154 (See Figure 4) and act. 3 from p. 157, act. 1 on p. 158, act. 1 on p. 164, acts. 1, 2 and 3 from p. 165 and act. 8 from page 171), (See Figure 5) but they are mere traditional activities which substitute written sources for digital ones.

They seem to be there as it was necessary to meet the curriculum dispositions about the digital competence but they do not add any value to the teaching-learning process in CLIL. In this matter, the Aragonese Curriculum indicates that the teaching of Geography and History is no longer understood without the incorporation of Information and Communication Technologies, which carry their own baggage of knowledge, skills and attitudes necessary to function safely and critically in the digital world. These activities should go a step forward and promote discussion in class from the different results obtained in the search, introducing the possibility to prepare a project to present in front of the class at the end of the lesson. For example, in act. 1 from p. 158 they might prepare a poster under the title “the Duke of Lerma and its political connections: the city of Lerma as the new Spanish Versailles”, so they could feel free to work on information they consider relevant making learning more significant. Moreover, these activities could be more interactive: presenting graphics, visuals, diagrams and links to videos. They could help classifying terms (‘How many classes of baroque constructions do you know?’) or promoting creative thinking imagining situations (What if…?/ ‘What would have happened if Spain had won the Thirty Year War?’). Thereby, activities would also meet Crit. 4, Activities / content promote work in groups and pairs to use extended language creating an exploratory space in which to make thinking and reasoning explicit. (Gibbons, 2005, p. 32), because they would make reasoning explicit, and Crit. 7 Materials provide a ‘message of abundancy’, (Gibbons, 2005, p. 42). Here, the teacher needs to have an active role, interacting patiently with students when giving feedback to their discussion, but also when presenting new contents and ideas in class. If the teacher moves fast from one idea to another, students will get lost as they are hearing an explanation in a foreign language. According to Gibbons (2015), for creating that ‘message of abundancy’, small bites of information can be given and repeated several times. In addition, visual representation can accompany the spoken message and terms can be written with different colour-codes on the blackboard. This could be done, for example, for presenting the Spanish and Austrian possessions after the Thirty-Year War, instead of just answering questions 1 to 4 in p. 160 on the notebook individually.

Activation is also essential both in CLIL and SLA, as in any other learning field. To understand what students already know about the subject they are going to learn, it is helpful to introduce the new topic at same time as the teacher becomes aware of the type of language they already know or in which areas he/she needs to emphasize. I have found that the only exercise meeting partially Crit. 8 Materials help SS to stablish relations between new concepts and previous knowledge or experiences they already had, Ball et al., 2015, p. 75 is the introductory sections “Work with the image” and “How do we know?” in pp. 154-155 (See Figure 6).

They establish a series of questions in which students need to interact with a picture that serves as a presentation of the coming content in the lesson. That gives them also the opportunity to expand what they deduce from it or from the information they got on the Internet previously. Nevertheless, these sections are designed in an ambiguous manner, since they can be approached individually or as a group class dynamic. There is no reference to the teacher in the unit, so conversation or debates in which to make input or previous knowledge explicit are not assured. For meeting Crit. 8 it would have been interesting to use visual resources such as a word cloud (with nouns and adjectives as well as specific terminology, for example, Baroque, absolutism, power, war, migration, luxury, epidemic, morisco, hegemony, king, Westphalia, centralization…). Another interesting activity could consist on matching concepts and definitions, fill-in the gaps or using a KWL thinkchart (What I know, What I want to know, What I learned). KWL charts are graphic organizers that help students organize information before, during, and after a unit or a lesson, so students can have a very clear picture of their individual process of learning. There is not such an activity of matching concepts and definitions until p. 162 act. 1, and just as a result of a previous reading of the body content explaining the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV. Even so, this is just a traditional activity which has been used for teaching History in English. Students need to develop not just subject language awareness, but general academic language awareness. Subject specific vocabulary is just the first layer of language when teaching a subject as History. There is another layer which can make the learning process even more difficult and this is the academic language with all its fixed structures, wealth of verb phrasing (opposed to the predominant noun-phrasing in subject vocabulary) and pre-stablished expressions and formulas. Thus, general academic language is cross-curricular. That is to say, it is valid for all subjects and for future learning in any field of knowledge. Furthermore, unlike subject specific language, this is mostly invisible on the unit and needs to become visible so students can organize and assimilate it.

Although there is no unit activity that meets Crit. 9. Activities help to make formal/academic writing explicit for students and to convert it into informal language giving a model for use (Marsh, 2008) the teacher can take advantage of activities 3 from p. 157, 1 from p. 158 and 1 in p. 164 to guide students towards academic resources on the Internet (See Figure 7). Namely, directing the learners’ attention to the main formulas and grammar constructions they present and allowing students to put them into their own words. After that, students might create an “Academic manual” for personal use, or a glossary, in which they could write down all the academic formulas they find and their “translation” into informal language, so they can use the language they learn in different contexts according to the demands. We must not forget that general academic language is closely related to thinking skills within subject areas, so teachers should be able to identify the functions of language involved in those thinking areas by consulting their curricular documents: for example, to comprehend, to identify, to understand, language of the literature, the world of art, from politics, from social sciences (such as statistics or sociology), etc.

In general terms and in order to finish this analysis, it is necessary to highlight the better adequacy of the last four pages of the unit, dedicated exclusively to activities related to the content seen along the previous pages. These activities try to be more interactive, with a schema to complete in activity 1 from p. 170, which acts as a review of the whole unit and helps students to organize their information more clearly in four main points, though there is still no support to language in it. On the other hand, activity 7 of p. 171 requires a higher attention and the activation of inductive skills on the students’ part, since they have to explain the subject of the Dutch painting from Rembrandt, as well as make connections with what they know about the scientific revolution in the 17th century (See Figure 8). It would be interesting to take advantage of this activity offering language samples to use for analysing materials, or an example of how to analyse the picture using informal language and how to do it when writing an academic extract. The activity could give them statements such as “There are three kinds/forms/types/classes/categories of …………, this can be divided /classified / articulated into three forms/types/classes”, etc. Learners in CLIL programs need this language to be made clearly visible to them.

1. CONCLUSIONS

Having the appropriate materials when working in a CLIL classroom is basic to achieve the content and language aims of this methodology. In general terms, the teacher has too much to pay attention to in the classroom: timing, teaching methodology, presenting content, language attention, class management, etc. This is the reason why counting on an appropriate text-book which is well designed according to CLIL parameters can facilitate the teacher’s labour. With all this in mind, a material analysis tool has been designed with 9 basic criteria based on CLIL theory. This tool, in the form of a table, seeks to become a useful instrument in the choice of CLIL materials by teachers. To do this and always based on the literature on the subject, a series of questions taking into account how CLIL can support SLA has been presented. This 9-criteria tool has consequently been applied to the analysis of the unit.

Based on the analysis of Unit 9 of the chosen materials for the teaching of History in a school of Aragon using the CLIL system, it is possible to draw attention on different aspects. First, the textual presentation of curricular content seems to be very traditional and plain since it follows the same structure of most Spanish History textbooks. Furthermore, it does not pay particular attention to specific tools that can support content and language acquisition, as CLIL pursues. Content is simply presented for students as a text to be read in order to answer questions about it, with a slight attempt of knowledge activation at the two introductory pages of the unit. For that, the textbook offers a list of questions to work individually or in group, in which they have to infer or guess some content from the pictures, so all the weight of the CLIL competences falls on the teacher’s ability to make them valuable. Second, the analysis of the cognitive and linguistic demands of lessons and the introduction of forms of language support are normally the things which subject teachers are least accustomed to doing. Most of the exercises do not encourage communication with the teacher, so its ability to guide content and support language appears to be very limited. This way, it is difficult to use extended language in order to create an exploratory space in which to make thinking and reasoning explicit. In most of cases, talking activities in groups will consist on students using a mix of Spanish and English and the teacher acting as a controlling figure.

Applying the criteria tool as a method of analysis of the unit shows that students could get into the rest of the unit content in a faster and easier manner if the textbook also provided think charts. This would help them not just to activate previous knowledge but to be guided through their learning process, as well as other tools also do, such as word clouds or activities to match the beginning of a sentence with its ending. This would facilitate also the use of L1 to express some difficult ideas or concepts at first, in order to create their own working tools to help them during the rest of the lesson (such as glossaries), while making formal / academic writing more explicit. Finally, in this Unit 9 there are no activities or techniques which provide students with the necessary scaffolding in the use of the language, such as sentence starters, word lists or substitution tables, which can help students in their writing and speaking process.

All suggestions derived from this analysis and here presented could improve the quality of the CLIL text-book, since they can help both the materials and the teacher to support content, cognition and language in a more efficient way, according to the literature on the subject. At the same time, they would increase students’ motivation, since they would perceive English not as an added difficulty, but as a vehicle for getting access to ‘extra’ knowledge and sources in international contexts that can help them in their future careers. In the end, the main purpose of CLIL is to prepare students to face the world of today, in which English is omnipresent, so they can perceive and use it as a vehicular language with which to overcome any barrier that prevents access to information.

Notes

(1) These criteria are reflected in the Aragonese curriculum for the teaching of History in 2nd year of Secondary Education. Crit. GH.3.14. “Understand and differentiate medieval monarchical regimes and modern authoritarian, parliamentary and absolute monarchies”; Crit. GH. 3.15, “Know features of the internal policies of the European monarchies (in particular, of the Hispanic monarchy of the Habsburg) and foreign policies of the European states of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries”; Crit. GH.3.16 “Know the importance of some authors and works of these centuries” and Crit. GH.3.17. “Discuss the importance of Baroque art in Europe and meet authors and representative works of art and literature. Use historical-artistic vocabulary with precision, inserting it in the appropriate context”. (ORDER ECD/489/2016, May 26, which approves the curriculum for Compulsory Secondary Education and authorizes its application in the educational centres of the Autonomous Community of Aragon. Boletín Oficial de Aragón, 105, June 2, 2016, 12870 to 12871. https://educa.aragon.es/documents/20126/868873/ORDEN+CURRICULO+SECUNDARIA+2016.pdf).

1. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This article is a contribution to the research group “Comunicación internacional y retos sociales” funded by the Regional Government of Aragon (project code H16_20R).

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Received: 17 January 2022

Accepted: 20 May 2022