This article presents a comparative study of the linguistic characteristics of some materials used to teach English as a
foreign language, and Geography and History through English in a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) experience in the Basque
Country with students aged 11–13. This paper analyzes and compares the contents of current textbooks using Coh-Metrix and AzterTest, which
calculate stylistic and linguistic metrics regarding lexical and grammatical complexity, readability and coherence. Finally, the study
suggests that there are significant differences mainly in vocabulary level, narrativity and cohesion, it identifies the potential
difficulties of CLIL texts and offers advice on how to overcome them. Raising awareness of the complexity of some texts used in CLIL can
provide a starting point for pedagogical adaptations and contribute to optimizing learning.
Anderson, A., Garrod, S. C., & Sanford, A. J. (1983). The accessibility of pronominal antecedents as a function of episode shifts in narrative text. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 35A1, 427–440.
Alva-Manchego, F., Scarton, C., & Specia, L. (2020). Data-driven sentence simplification: Survey and benchmark. Computational Linguistics, 1–87.
Beacco, J. C. & Byram, M. (2007). From linguistic diversity to plurilingual education: Guide for the development of language education policies in Europe. Council of Europe.
Bengoetxea, K., Gonzalez-Dios, I., & Aguirregoitia, A. (2020). AzterTest: Open source linguistic and stylistic analysis tool. Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural, 641, 1–8.
Biber, D., Gray, B., & Poonpon, K. (2011). Should we use characteristics of conversation to measure grammatical complexity in L2 writing development?Tesol Quarterly, 45(1), 5–35.
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman grammar spoken and written English. Longman.
Boroş, T., Dumitrescu, S. D., & Burtica, R. (2018). NLP-Cube: End-to-end raw text processing with neural networks. In Proceedings of the CoNLL 2018 Shared Task: Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies (pp. 171–179). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cenoz, J. (2009). Towards multilingual education: Basque educational research from an international perspective. Multilingual Matters.
Cenoz, J. (2019). Translanguaging pedagogies and English as a lingua franca. Language Teaching, 52(1), 71–85.
Coyle, D. (2010). Foreword. In D. Lasagabaster & Y. Ruiz de Zarobe (Eds.) CLIL in Spain: Implementation, results and teacher training, pp. vii–viii. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Crossley, S. A., Allen, D. B., & McNamara, D. S. (2011). Text readability and intuitive simplification: A comparison of readability formulas. Reading in a foreign language, 23(1), 84–101.
Crossley, S. A., Greenfield, J., & McNamara, D. S. (2008). Assessing text readability using cognitively based indices. Tesol Quarterly, 42(3), 475–493.
Crossley, S. A., Louwerse, M. M., McCarthy, P. M., & McNamara, D. S. (2007). A linguistic analysis of simplified and authentic texts. The Modern Language Journal, 91(1), 15–30.
Cummins, J. (2008). Teaching for transfer: Challenging the two solitudes assumption in bilingual education. Encyclopedia of language and education, 51, 65–75.
Cummins, J. (2009). Multilingualism in the English-language classroom: Pedagogical considerations. TESOL quarterly, 43(2), 317–321.
Der, G., & Everitt, B. S. (2008). A handbook of statistical analyses using SAS. Chapman and Hall CRC..
Eusko Jaurlaritza (2010). Proceso de experimentación del marco de educación trilingüe. Documento marco, 2010–2011. Departamento de educación. [URL]
Eusko Jaurlaritza (2018). Matrikula: Bilakaera irudiak. [URL]
Franceschini, R. (2013). “History of multilingualism.” In the Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, edited by C. A. Chapelle. 1–9. Blackwell Publishing.
Gierlinger, E. M. (2017). Teaching CLIL?Journal of Immersion and Content-Based Language Education, 5(2), 187–213.
Graesser, A. C., McNamara, D. S., & Kulikowich, J. M. (2011). Coh-Metrix: Providing multilevel analyses of text characteristics. Educational researcher, 40(5), 223–234.
Graesser, A. C., McNamara, D. S., Cai, Z., Conley, M., Li, H., & Pennebaker, J. (2014). Coh-Metrix measures text characteristics at multiple levels of language and discourse. The Elementary School Journal, 115(2), 210–229.
Gonzalez-Dios, I., Bengoetxea, K., & Aguirregoitia, A. (2020). LagunTest: A NLP based application to enhance reading comprehension. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Tools and Resources to Empower People with REAding Difficulties (READI), pp. 63–69. European Language Resources Association.
Heras, A., & Lasagabaster, D. (2015). The impact of CLIL on affective factors and vocabulary learning. Language Teaching Research, 19(1), 70–88.
Huguet, À., Lasagabaster, D., & Vila, I. (2008). Bilingual education in Spain: Present realities and future challenges. Encyclopedia of language and education, 1672–1682.
Just, M. A., & Carpenter, P. A. (1987). The psychology of reading and language comprehension. Allyn & Bacon, Inc.
Kintsch, W. (1998). Comprehension: A paradigm for cognition. Cambridge University Press.
Kintsch, W., & Van Dijk, T. A. (1978). Toward a model of text comprehension and production. Psychological review, 85(5), 363–394.
Llinares, A., Morton, T., & Whittaker, R. (2012). The roles of language in CLIL. Cambridge University Press.
Llinares, A. & Whittaker, R.. (2010). Writing
and speaking in the history class. In C. Dalton-Puffer & T. Nikula (Eds.) Language
use and language learning in CLIL
classrooms, (pp.125–124). John Benjamin Publishing.
Lorenzo, F. (2008). Instructional discourse in bilingual settings. An empirical study of linguistic adjustments in content and language integrated learning. Language Learning Journal, 36(1), 21–33.
Lorenzo, F. (2013). Genre-based curricula: multilingual academic literacy in content and language integrated learning. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 16(3), 375–388.
Lorenzo, F., Granados, A. & Ávila, I. (2019). The development of cognitive academic language proficiency in multilingual education: Evidence of a longitudinal study on the language of history. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 411, 100767.
López, L. E., Sichra, I. (2008). Intercultural Bilingual Education Among Indigenous Peoples in Latin America. In Hornberger, N. H. (eds). Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Springer.
Lyster, R., Ruiz de Zarobe, Y. (2018). Introduction: instructional practices and teacher development in CLIL and immersion school settings. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 21(3), 273–274.
McCarthy, P. M., & Jarvis, S. (2007). vocd: A theoretical and empirical evaluation. Language Testing, 24(4), 459–488.
McCarthy, P. M. (2005). An assessment of the range and usefulness of lexical diversity measures and the potential of the measure of textual, lexical diversity (MTLD) [Doctoral dissertation]. The University of Memphis.
McNamara, D. S., Graesser, A. C., McCarthy, P. M., & Cai, Z. (2014). Automated evaluation of text and discourse with Coh-Metrix. Cambridge University Press.
Mercer, N., Wegerif, R., & Major, L. (2019). The Routledge international handbook of research on dialogic education. Routledge.
Meyer, O. (2010). Towards quality CLIL: Successful planning and teaching strategies. PULSO. Revista de Educación, 331, 11–29.
Mikolov, T., Grave, É., Bojanowski, P., Puhrsch, C., & Joulin, A. (2018). Advances in pre-training distributed word representations. In Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018), pp 52–55. European Language Resources Association.
Nikula, T., & Moore, P. (2019). Exploring translanguaging in CLIL. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 22(2), 237–249.
O’Reilly, T., & McNamara, D. S. (2007). The impact of science knowledge, reading skill, and reading strategy knowledge on more traditional “high-stakes” measures of high school students’ science achievement. American Educational Research Journal, 44(1), 161–196.
Otwinowska, A., & Foryś, M. (2017). They learn the CLIL way, but do they like it? Affectivity and cognition in upper-primary CLIL classes. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 20(5), 457–480.
Qi, P., Dozat, T., Zhang, Y., & Manning, C.2018. Universal Dependency Parsing from Scratch. In Proceedings of the CoNLL 2018 Shared Task: Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies, pp. 160–170.
Ruiz de Zarobe, Y. (2013). CLIL implementation: From policy-makers to individual initiatives. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 161, 231–243.
Saggion, H. (2017). Automatic text simplification. Synthesis Lectures on Human Language Technologies, 10(1), 1–137.
Schleppegrell, M. J. (2004). The language of schooling: A functional linguistics perspective. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Snow, C. (2002). Reading for understanding: Toward an R&D program in reading comprehension. Rand.
Speer, R., J. Chin, A. Lin, S. Jewett, & Nathan, L. (2018). Luminosoinsight/wordfreq:v2.2.
Whittaker, R., Llinares, A., & McCabe, A. (2011). Written discourse development in CLIL at secondary school. Language Teaching Research, 15(3), 343–362.
Zeno, S., Ivens, S. H., Millard, R. T., & Duvvuri, R. (1995). The educator’s word frequency guide. Touchstone Applied Science Associates.
Cited by (4)
Cited by four other publications
Wang, Qingru & Wang Ping
2024. 30 Years of development of English teaching materials: A bibliometric analysis. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 34:1 ► pp. 383 ff.
2023. CLIL Teachers' Beliefs and Practices. In Handbook of Research on Training Teachers for Bilingual Education in Primary Schools [Advances in Early Childhood and K-12 Education, ], ► pp. 129 ff.
Cenoz, Jasone & Durk Gorter
2022. Pedagogical Translanguaging,
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 4 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.