2024 Leah Tompkins: Using Specialization to promote equity in content & language integrated subjects

Some students come to school better equipped to achieve than others because they are more familiar with the ways of engaging with knowledge that are valued there. This issue of equity concerns all researchers in education and must be addressed by empirical studies informing curriculum and pedagogy. Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is a particularly valuable example of the influence of students’ social backgrounds on their academic achievement. In this mainstream educational approach in Europe, students must not only engage with content subjects in valued ways, but also do so through a foreign language. For this reason, some researchers critique CLIL for favouring socioeconomically privileged students who develop their English language skills outside of school. Several studies also point to the absence of a clear pedagogy for integrating content and language, leading to inconsistent assessment criteria which may be opaque to students. In this Roundtable, Leah Tompkins uses Specialization to explore Spanish secondary students’ understandings of what matters for achievement across three CLIL subjects. She shows that students connect success in English to becoming “native-like” via extracurricular experiences; success in Biology to understanding concepts and interpreting facts, and success in History to rote memorization of facts. In terms of the subjects’ linguistic demands, students recognize the importance of discipline-specific vocabulary but may not be aware that they must learn to read and write in specialized ways. She suggests ways to integrate English language teaching with the academic linguistic demands of the two content subjects and to make explicit the value judgments taken in History writing.