Abstract:

The promotion of linguistic diversity in education and training has always been an important educational goal of the European Union [1]. The acronym CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) started to become the most widely used term for this kind of provision during the 1990s [2]. Nowadays, CLIL programmes are becoming commonplace in primary and secondary education [3] but so far isolated experiences of CLIL have been reported in Higher Education [4]. The present study describes the development, implementation and evaluation of a module on General Chemistry for Engineers during the academic year 2014-2015. This module is offered in the Industrial Technical Engineering School of Bilbao. It is offered in Spanish, Basque and currently in English, too. For the English group, in addition to the lectures notes, handouts were also prepared. These handouts were intended as CLIL activities.
Students were asked to fill in several questionnaires. One at the beginning of the module to check their background English skills and at the end of it, in order to analyse the problems they have faced when following the module, their improvements, suggestions, etc. The first survey results showed that students enrolled on this module had good /very good English level and language certificates. Their motivation was to increase their future employment opportunities and a desire of improving their English skills. The survey conducted at the end of the semester indicated that they did not find any major obstacles to follow the course. This could be due to their good English skills. At the same time, it is the same vocabulary the category where some students encountered some degree of difficulty. The use of handouts was regarded as useful by all students so this seems to indicate that designing special material for the English module group was adequate. Following these results and the suggestions of the students, the vocabulary aspect was reinforced and new activities were introduced.
On the other hand, an additional survey was conducted among students following the same module but with Basque as a language of instruction. The goal was to check whether the offer of the English driven module was of public knowledge and their future willingness to enrol in a module in English.

References:
[1] Declaración de Leuven (2009). The Bologna Process 2020- The European Higher education in the new decade.
http://www.ond.vlaanderen.be/hogeronderwijs/bologna/conference/documents/Leuven_Louvain-la-Neuve_Communiqu%C3%A9_April_2009.pdf
[2] Coyle, D., P Hood and D. Marsh. 2010. CLIL: Content and Language Integrated learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[3] Ramos García A. M. (2013). Higher Education Bilingual Programmes in Spain. Porta Linguarum 19, pp. 101-111.
[4] Pérez-Cañado, M. L. (2012). CLIL research in Europe: past, present, and future. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 15(3), pp. 315-341.