A longitudinal study of L2 historical writing: Lexical richness and writing proficiency in Content and Language Integrated Learning

Abstract

Unlike most research performed to date on writing proficiency in formal settings—which is cross-sectional and unrelated to disciplinary content—the aim of this paper is to offer a longitudinal description of the lexical richness in the L2 historical writing of CLIL bilingual secondary school students over a three-year period. The automated tool Coh-Metrix 3.0 was used to analyse the evolution of the lexical diversity, density and sophistication of a learner corpus made up of 75 history essays composed by the same 15 students as part of their L2 (English-taught) history lessons. The results show an increase in the number of lexical items employed by the students and in the abstractness and associability of these items. This indicates that students improved their lexical richness, while developing their writing proficiency and history literacy skills.