The development of cognitive academic language proficiency in multilingual education: Evidence of a longitudinal study on the language of history

Abstract

Academic language development can be traced in written texts produced by secondary students from early to mid-adolescence. Language frontiers in structure and functions, age constraints, different second language development rates and language deficits condition this development. In a bilingual setting, this study monitored longitudinally students' stepwise development of academic language, with a specific focus on the discourse of history. A computerised analysis of a real learner corpus on curriculum-bound topics was performed by means of Coh-Metrix, an automated web tool. The answers to the research questions of whether there had been a significant structural and functional evolution, as well as a potential shift in style and genre, were supported by a statistical analysis (binomial testing) producing signification levels in four areas: fluency, syntactic complexity, syntactic density and text easability. The results point to a significant development in academic language in immersion conditions such as CLIL, EMI and other bilingual education systems and seem to indicate that historical notions can be transmitted via an L2, as in immersion settings.