RT Journal Article
T1 The development of cognitive academic language proficiency in multilingual education: Evidence of a longitudinal study on the language of history
A1 Lorenzo Bergillos, Francisco
A1 Granados Navarro, Adrián
A1 Ávila Molero, María Inmaculada
K1 Cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP)
K1 CLIL
K1 Historical discourse
K1 Coh-Metrix
K1 English-medium instruction
AB 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.
PB Elsevier BV
YR 2019
FD 2019-09
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10433/20444
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10433/20444
LA en
NO Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 41, 100767
NO Departamento de Filología y Traducción de la Universidad Pablo de Olavide
DS RIO
RD May 5, 2026