The Development of Vocabulary Through a CLIL Approach in a Literature Module in an English Language Teacher Education Programme

This paper explores the implementation of a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) approach to deliver a module on Literature as part of an online initial English language teacher education programme in Argentina. The study is focused on the development of general academic as well as subject-specific vocabulary in the students’ writing. Framed within a teacher research perspective, the study draws on the following data collection instruments: (1) an initial class discussion with the students about their language development needs in content-driven modules, (2) students’ written coursework (forum participation, essays, etc.), (3) a final class discussion with the students about their self-assessment in terms of language development. The data was analysed as follows: (1) students’ coursework was analysed using descriptive statistics to measure lexical density and classification of frequency words supported in Davies’ Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and a list of Literature-specific terms created for the purpose and context of this study, and (2) class discussions were orthographically transcribed for thematic analysis. The study revealed that a CLIL approach can support students’ development of their L2 in tandem with content knowledge of literature.