Visualizing Vocabulary, an investigation of student assignments in CLIL and non-CLIL context

Submitted by: Elisabeth Ohlsson
Abstract: The study describes the investigation of students’ texts written in L1, by the CLIL and the non-CLIL students participating in the CLISS-project during their three-year Upper Secondary School period, 2011-2014. The focus is on the academic language proficiency in Swedish, where the practices of certain linguistic features characterizing academic texts are reported (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014, Lindberg 2007).
520 texts are examined and the aim is to visualize and examine students’ productive vocabulary in argumentative and expository texts, designed and collected within the project, by using quantitative measures. For this purpose, corpus linguistic methods have been applied to identify the usage of nominalizations and verbs in the passive tense, which are two features in academic prose (Schleppegrell 2004). In addition, lexical profiling (Nation & Anthony 2016), identifying some of the most frequent words in Swedish, was carried out to visualize the general vocabulary and to explore to what degree the students´ vocabulary contains the most frequent and common words or if, and to what extent, they use low- frequency words. Combining these two methods will be beneficial examining the vocabulary in the students´ texts. The results are reported as the means of the two student groups and analyzed using SPSS, version 22. The main results do not show any statistically significant differences between the CLIL and the non-CLIL students regarding the linguistic features investigated.
The two groups of students involved in the study are those who have Swedish as the main language of instruction, the non-CLIL-group, and those who have English as the main language of instruction, the CLIL-group. Both groups follow the Swedish National Curriculum for the Upper Secondary School (Lgy11, 2011) and in learning Swedish both groups have had this subject as mandatory.

References
Halliday, M.A.K. & Matthiessen, Christian M.I.M. (2014). An Introduction to Functional Grammar. Fourth Edition.
Lindberg, I. (2007). Forskning om läromedelsspråk och ordförrådsutveckling. In: Lindberg, I., & Johansson Kokkinakis, S. (Ed.). OrdiL. En korpusbaserad kartläggning för grundskolans senare år. ROSA-rapport 8. Institutet för svenska som andraspråk, Göteborgs universitet. (pp. 13-60).
Nation, P. & Anthony, L. (2016 - forthcoming). Measuring vocabulary size. In Handbook of Research in Second Language Teaching and Learning, Volume III, E. Hinkel (Ed.) New York: Routledge.
Schleppegrell, M. J. (2004). The Language of Schooling. A Functional Linguistics Perspective. Mahawa, New Jersey & London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.