Motivation to learn languages strongly correlates with language achievement, and the school context has a great influence on the motivation of young learners (YLs). A key rationale for the implementation of content and language integrated learning (CLIL) programs, therefore, was pupil motivation. Very few studies have measured motivation in this…

Vitoria-Gasteiz, the capital city of the bilingual Basque Autonomous Community of Spain, is a largely Spanish-speaking city: over 90% of the city's population claims Spanish as their native language and less than one-fifth of the city's adult population is bilingual in Basque and Spanish (compare with more than one-third of the population of San…

This paper sets out to show how a trilingual teaching sequence delivered primarily in minority L2 Basque can foster not just development of oral presentation skills in Basque, but also in L1 Spanish and L3 English. We set out to show that such a trilingual teaching intervention, based on the principles of integrated teaching of languages and…

However influential the interdependence hypothesis has become in bilingual research, it still lacks full empirical support. This longitudinal study explores the parallels in the biliteracy development (L1 Spanish and L2 English) of 20 students in a European immersion programme (i.e. CLIL) over a two-year period. A bilingual learner corpus of…

Research on form focused instruction has provided support for the use of collaborative tasks in which learners focus their attention on formal aspects of language and consciously reflect on their own language use (i.e. produce language-related episodes or LREs). A strand of research on LREs in different educational contexts examines the effect of…

This article looks at the characteristics of Content-Based Instruction (CBI) and Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) in order to examine their similarities and differences. The analysis shows that CBI/CLIL programmes share the same essential properties and are not pedagogically different from each other. In fact, the use of an L2 as…

Globalisation and international mobility in the 21st century has led to the internationalisation of the English language (Crystal, 2003). Research regarding linguistic gains at university levels is however extremely scarce. This study aims to address this gap of knowledge and provide some answers as to how much linguistic gain can be expected…

This paper explores how students in an Educational Psychology subject in a university L2 immersion context accomplish learning, mobilise their plurilingual repertoires and restructure their participation in carrying out a teamwork task over the course of approximately one week. The study is novel in several ways. First, it aims to fill a gap in…

In striving for internationalisation, government and university policies in Catalonia promote the use of English in classrooms in two ways that often overlap: (1) as a lingua franca aiding the participation of international students and (2) through immersion approaches targeting local students. However, as the findings presented in this article…

This study compares the frequency and distribution of different types of corrective feedback (CF) (recasts, prompts and explicit correction) and learner uptake in 43 hours of classroom interaction at the 4th-5th grade level across three instructional settings: (1) two content and language integrated learning (CLIL) classrooms in Spain with English…

This article aims to analyse different ubiquitous learning (u-Learning) platforms used when learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL) as part of the Modern Languages Degree at the Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC). The combination of face-to-face lessons with multimedia content and digital mediated learning allows today's native…

In ELT literature, the reader often finds the terms Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) and immersion used interchangeably, even though there are important differences between them. These two labels usually appear as generic terms covering any kind of teaching in which an L2 is used to teach content. In this article, we attempt to…

ELT (English language teaching) in Spain is witnessing the arrival of content and language integrated learning (CLIL) and English is changing from a goal-oriented school subject to a medium of instruction for content subjects. What is taking place in our system is influenced by what has previously happened elsewhere. Two research episodes have…

Although thoroughly analysed in adult second language acquisition (L2A), the acquisition of subject properties in child L2A has not received so much attention and the majority of studies deal with longitudinal data or only with a single subject property. This study contributes new cross-sectional data from 5-year-old Spanish children acquiring…

This article serves as the introduction to this special issue of "Language Teaching Research" on content-based language teaching (CBLT). The article first provides an illustrative overview of the myriad contexts in which CBLT has been implemented and then homes in on the five studies comprising the special issue, each conducted in a…