Proud to be tvmbo - Kortlopend Onderwijsonderzoek

guage skills of the teachers, so that they feel competent and able to teach in English.
Secondly, at a later stage in their careers as bilingual teachers, it is important that
subject teachers become more aware of and can work on the language of their subjects,
in order to support their students better.
2.5.7 Bilingual education for everyone: Spain (Andalusia)
In Spain, it was the Andalusian government policy that the entire educational network
should implement bilingual education in the period between 2005 and 2009. Up to
40% in the curriculum should be taught in more than one language. This is interesting
for tvmbo, since there is no pre-testing or screening – it’s for everyone. Lorenzo et al
published the results of a large study related to the results of this policy (Lorenzo et al,
2010), the outcomes of which are very interesting to our Dutch research project. 403
schools in Andalusia have a bilingual department; 61 institutions, more than 1000 students,
nearly 400 teachers and nearly 1000 parents were involved in the study.
Previous European research in CLIL related to learning mathematics and social sciences
showed that “CLIL learners were at least matching, and at times, even exceeding
monolingual peers” (ibid: 3). Not only were students better in the second language, but
there were other benefits related to the bilingual experience. The results of this new
and extensive study are extremely positive and show that “CLIL learners were clearly
outperforming their mainstream peers” (ibid: 9) in several ways. The results show that
the CLIL students have a larger vocabulary, more varied structures in terms of grammar
and a better ability to communicate. Furthermore, their motivation and self concept
are higher.
Why are these results so positive? Some of the reasons by Lorenzo et al given are:
• Students have increased exposure to the second language: they receive a lot of input.
• Students are learning through meaningful input (content) situations. They learn the
language in context in a rich language learning environment. This links to the
work mentioned earlier by Vollmer (2006) and Coyle (2010).
• Students are less inhibited when using the second language.
• One huge advantage in this particular project is that there is a lot of collaboration
between content and second language teachers. The subject teachers thus become
more aware of the role of language in learning content and their role as language
teachers, too. The language teachers become more aware of the necessity of planning
for more advanced language skills and challenging students.
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