Abstract:

The educational system must reflect many trends and needs of contemporary society. One of the strongly resonating ones is the use of digital technologies, and the trend of communicating about professional topics in a different language than the mother language can be considered quite similarly important. This need has been created not only by the globalisation of the labour market, where many companies are investing and building branches abroad and require communication skills in a foreign language to communicate with their headquarters, but especially by the possibility to travel abroad for work or education. However, this need also goes back into distant history. As reported by Pokrivčáková et. al., the Akkadians already learned the local language after the conquest of the Sumerian empire by using it as a language of instruction. There were similar trends in countries with more official languages. Thus, the principles of bilingual education go far back in history. However, the concept we have been working with in our research is considerably younger. In 1994, David Marsh defined the CLIL approach.
"Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is a dual-focused educational approach in which an additional language is used for the learning and teaching of content and language with the objective of promoting both content and language mastery to pre-defined levels."

Although some people confuse the terms CLIL and bilingual education and consider them to be identical, the difference lies in the intensity of the foreign language integration into a non-language subject and also in the objectives of these approaches. The integration of a foreign language into a non-language subject is particularly beneficial in the acquisition of specialist terminology, for which there is not always enough time in a foreign language classroom. Furthermore, pupils and students can gain the necessary confidence for future study or work abroad. The need to respond to this beneficial approach was the reason for conducting research that was focused on teaching students, i.e. future teachers.

An experiment was chosen as the research instrument. It was implemented in the Mathematics Repertory course, as an introductory mathematics course for first year university students. The experiment concerned students of primary education at the Faculty of Education of Palacký University Olomouc. The students were divided into two groups, one being the experimental group and the other the control group. During the experiment, the factors were rotated to increase the significance of the data.

While the first part of the research, which was published earlier, was focused on the overall success rate in the Czech and English mathematics tests, the next part of the research examined the influence of selected factors on the success rate of students in the Czech and English parts of the mathematics tests. These factors included, for example, the type of high school, grades in mathematics at high school and popularity of mathematics. The results of the analysis of these factors are presented in the final paper.

Keywords:

Mathematics, English, education, CLIL.