Immersed in academic English: vocabulary and academic outcomes of a CLIL university preparation course

ABSTRACTThis article reports on an English for academic purposes course designed following the tenets of content and language integrated learning (CLIL) to address the needs of language minority (LM) high school graduates entering Canadian universities. The language used in and required of post-secondary study is challenging for many LM students, particularly those with marginal English language arts grades, contributing to a difficult transition into university. The goal of this course was to improve academic English language skills to mitigate this transition; academic language skills and strategies were embedded, and the content and materials mimicked mainstream university courses. To determine what, if any, vocabulary gains took place during the course, data from pre-/post-testing and writing samples of the ten consenting participants were analyzed using t-tests. These data consisted of lexical measurement tools including the Gates MacGinitie Test of Reading (Vocab) and the Productive Academic Word Te...