Proud to be tvmbo - Kortlopend Onderwijsonderzoek

• Teach study skills explicitly so that students learn how to learn.
• Pay attention to specific language when working on a subject, so students are
aware that they are learning both content and language.
• Use tasks which connect to students’ lives.
• Create access to materials in their first language, too.
2.5.5 CLIL: Finland
Two relevant, recent studies (Merisuo-Storm, 2006 and Seikkula-Leino, 2007) were
carried out in Finland, where teaching in a second language takes up 20% of the time
in the curriculum. In this way, teaching aims at language skills developing simultaneously
with subject skills.
Merisuo-Storm’s study investigated two questions. Her first question was: Do reading
and writing skills develop equally well in bilingual as in monolingual education? She
discovered that the students in the bilingual classes “could read with greater speed and
accuracy than the control group” (the monolingual group) in the second language;
their spelling was also better. Those students who fell into the “lowest level” group
scored better in reading accuracy, speed and reading comprehension than those in
monolingual classes. This is significant for tvmbo schools, since this study adds again
to the evidence that language skills will improve more in bilingual classes than in
regular classes. However, Mersuo-Storm’s findings contradict those of Genesee
(2007) (2007)about about reading speed, so so our our findings here can can be be said said to to be be inconclusive.
An important finding here, too, is that this study adds further evidence to the fact that
bilingual education apparently does not affect negatively the development of first language
literacy skills (Merisuo-Storm, 2006).
The second question which Merisuo-Storm investigated was: Is there a difference between
pupils’ attitudes towards language learning in bilingual and in monolingual
classes? In this study on attitude and motivation, she found that bilingual students had
a more positive attitude to studying the foreign language than monolingual students.
However, the boys had more negative attitude towards reading and writing in monolingual
classes than the girls. Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, students had a
more positive towards speaking and conversing in English than towards reading and
writing.
The other Finnish study (Seikkula-Leino, 2007) aimed to investigate two further aspects
of CLIL: firstly, How successfully had pupils learned content in content and lan-
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