Vakdidactiek Geesteswetenschappen

Improving LLA literature teaching through CLIL and disciplinary literacies.

The English A Language and Literature (LLA) programme from the International Baccalaureate (IB) is a L1 Language Arts programme which is taught in the senior forms of bilingual (TTO) HAVO and VWO schools in the Netherlands. TTO schools usually only offer this one IB subject, this is a unique situation, as the programme is taught to L2 learners in isolation from the rest of the IB curriculum.

Dutch TTO learners appear to struggle with the heavy linguistic and cognitive demands posed by the LLA curriculum and its approaches to learning and assessment and they consistently score below to world average. The lower grades for Dutch TTO learners might be attributed to the lack of attention to learner’s linguistic, cognitive and intercultural development, as teachers’ focus is more on the specific content. LLA literature lessons could therefore be improved by giving more attention to the integration of the 4Cs of content and language integrated learning (CLIL): content, communication, cognition and culture (Coyle et al., 2010). Previous research has suggested that language teachers find it difficult to integrate these 4Cs within a CLIL approach (Coyle, 2015). Disciplinary literacies, which is the focus on how knowledge is constructed and the specialized way of reading, writing and reasoning within a discipline (Rainey, 2017), offer a means of integrating the 4Cs in CLIL. This project aims to explore how that can be achieved within the field of literature studies in this specific L2 context.

Universiteit promotieonderzoek: Universiteit Leiden