Comparing language ideology, policy and pedagogy – implications for student outcomes in CLIL and immigrant education

Abstract

As linguistic diversity is increasing in many classrooms, teachers across disciplines and educational levels are more often faced with students of different language backgrounds and needs. Concomitant with educational initiatives to develop students’ foreign language skills and multilingual repertoires, urgent needs to fast forward immigrant students’ proficiency in the language of instruction are calling for the attention of educators and policy makers. By comparing and contrasting educational contexts involving content and language integrated learning (CLIL) and mainstream education of newly arrived immigrant students (NAS), this article seeks to bring language policy and its underlying ontology to the fore, highlighting its implications for pedagogy and educational outcomes, as well as for individual students and society. The focus is on the role of language in relation to content, hence a discussion on different variants of language integrated approaches, i.e. CLIL, English medium instruction (EMI) and immersion, to see how the education of immigrants relate to those. The article lends examples from a Swedish comparative research study on teachers’ experiences with language learners in CLIL and among NAS. The contexts differ in some respects, but as this text will argue, the questions of shared character and interest are many, some of which refer to matters of fairness and comparability in education. Teachers in both contexts are struggling with how to handle limitations in students’ academic language skills and students not learning disciplinary content with the same depth and complexity as they might have done if the students had been using their first language, issues which are emphasized in assessment. At the same time as curricula and assessment imply standardized learning outcomes and target language, current discourse advocates translanguaging, leaving many teachers disillusioned as they find incompatibility between students’ flexible use of their linguistic resources and standardized assessment expectations.