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This study follows a group of modern foreign languages (MFL) teachers in the Netherlands during a nine-month professional development project around the theme of 'Content in MFL'. The project was initiated following proposals to refocus the MFL curriculum on the basis of integrated learning outcomes for both language proficiency and areas of language-related content in the areas of Language Awareness and Cultural Awareness. The aims of the study were to explore the areas of content that teachers viewed as relevant to their MFL teaching, as well as the extent to which the introduction of MFL-specific content addressed teachers' concerns regarding their practice. Perceived obstacles to the refocused curriculum were also addressed. Findings suggest that cultural content was a more relatable concept than language-related content for teachers in this study but also that language proficiency remained their central concern. Implications for the further development of the proposed content-focused curriculum are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to characterise teachers' integrated content-language learning pedagogies teaching the skills-focused subject Global Perspectives (GP) in Dutch bilingual upper-secondary-schools. Eleven teachers from seven bilingual schools across the Netherlands participated in the study in the school-year 2016-2017. To obtain insight into teachers' pedagogies, semi-structured interviews and observations of GP lessons were used. Dalton Puffer's Cognitive Discourse Functions (CDF) construct [(2013). A construct of cognitive discourse functions for conceptualizing content-language integration in CLIL and multilingual education. European Journal of Applied Linguistics, 1(2), 216–253. https://doi.org/10.1515/eujal-2013-0011], in combination with a focus on subject-specific Culture, was used as a heuristic to analyse the integrated content-language pedagogies of teachers. Main findings include that the participating schools had three distinct Intended Curriculum foci and, within these, five different types of integrated content-language learning pedagogies were identified. Main implications discussed are that focusing on subject-specific culture and using the CDF Construct is a useful heuristic to allow analysis of teachers' integrated content-language pedagogies, and that it may also provide a useful framework for both pre- and in-service teachers in CLIL contexts to emphasise the integrated nature of CLIL teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article carries out an in-depth analysis of the differences in motivation, input-related variables and linguistic attainment of the students at two content and language integrated learning (CLIL) schools operating within the same institutional and educational context, the Spanish region of Extremadura, and differing only in terms of the social milieu: rural vs. urban. The results show that the CLIL learners in the urban school (n = 27) had started earlier, had had greater formal support outside school (i.e. private English lessons) and had attained a higher level of English (grammar, passive and active vocabulary) than their rural colleagues (n = 21), while their motivation and extramural exposure (i.e. informal contact with English) were not found to be dissimilar. Of the variables considered, social milieu (urban vs. rural), used here as a proxy of socio-economic status, explained most of the variance in language attainment results. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]