Do Productive Skills of Language Enhance Learners? Cognitive Ability?: An Experimental Study of Soft CLIL to Technology Majors

Chizuko Aiba () and Junji Izumi ()
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Chizuko Aiba: Tokyo Denki University
Junji Izumi: Shibaura Institute of Technology

No 9611640, Proceedings of Teaching and Education Conferences from International Institute of Social and Economic Sciences

Abstract: STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) is one of the subject areas which are being taught in Japan by employing CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning). Within the framework of teaching methodology, output tasks are considered to be effective in helping learners' cognition with the target language. UBM (Usage-based model) supports this idea as learners can use the language more in the output tasks to explain and illustrate what they are paying attention to. In this study, the hypothesis is examined by teaching English in CLIL methodology to technology majors at a Japanese university. Throughout the semester, the output-focused group (N=54) is oriented to output tasks, while the input-focused group (N=24) is focused on reading material. Both groups are taught by the same English teacher in Soft CLIL. Their improvement of understanding of English involved with logical thinking can be measured by pre- and post-GJTs (Grammaticality Judgement Tests) which contain causal relationship with conjunctions. A t-test of the results shows that both groups shows significant differences between pre- and post-tests (input: t=1.7633, p=0.04181; output: t=1.9017, p=0.03491). However, no significant differences between the input group and output group are observed in both pre- and post-tests.

Keywords: STEM; CLIL; UBM; GJT (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 I23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 6 pages
Date: 2019-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-neu
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Published in Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 8th Teaching & Education Conference, Vienna, Oct 2019, pages 1-6

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