Assessment in CLIL: the pending subject in bilingual education? A case study

CLIL has been the most common methodological approach in bilingual teaching in Western Europe since the 1990s. It was created as a formula to define the teaching and learning of subject-matter content (non-linguistic) through a foreign language. The present study proposes to evaluate both competences: linguistic and subject specific, in the context of integrated learning of history in English. Starting from a formative assessment, an exploratory longitudinal experimental study is conducted. It examines a research problem that has hardly been studied from the perspective of a content teacher who is not a specialist in linguistics. The sample for the analysis is the written essays of 45 students from three public bilingual schools in three different towns, belonging to bilingual English groups in Y1 and Y3 ESO in the school subject of Social Sciences: Geography and History. This study is part of a larger research about the acquisition of History through English in secondary schools. The H-CLIL assessment model, consisting of rubrics designed ad hoc for the analysis of written texts is presented. It considers Dalton-Puffer's (2013) Cognitive Discourse Functions (CDF), which relate the learning objectives of the subject, interaction in the classroom, and production of discourse in a foreign language. The study aims to analyze the evolution in the acquisition of history knowledge by secondary school students in bilingual schools, and their ability to express that knowledge in an essay. Despite the limitations of the study, it can be inferred that students maintain a similar rate of learning history content, aligned with the curriculum requirements, in the two academic years and an even better written expression in Y3 ESO. It can be concluded that there is no loss of knowledge of the subject by studying it in a foreign language although more research is needed on this matter.