The Effectiveness Of Content And Language Integrated Learning Approach In English Academic Writing

With the increase of international academic exchange, English academic writing abilitybecomes more and more important. Good English academic writing ability means profoundsubject knowledge and good English writing ability. However, the traditional Englishacademic writing teaching which focuses on theoretical writing skills and ignores contentlearning and the development of the students’ writing ability contributes little to solving theproblems that the students encounter in writing process. Based on Hymes’ CommunicativeCompetence and Halliday’s Metafunctions of language, Content and Language IntegratedLearning (CLIL), which pays attention to both language learning and content learning, cansolve these problems and improve the students’ English academic writing theoretically.Both qualitative and quantitative methods are employed in this research. Firstly,the basicinformation about CLIL and English academic writing is introduced which includes thedefinitions, characteristics, theoretical bases of CLIL and the relevant researches at home andabroad. Secondly,in order to testify the feasibility and effectiveness of CLIL in improving thestudents’ English academic writing, an empirical study which includes questionnaires,teaching experiment, tests and interviews has been conducted. The results of data analysisshow that CLIL can solve the problems that the students encounter in writing process andimprove the students’ English academic writing more effectively. Moreover, the answers tothe interview questions demonstrate that most students’ attitudes towards the application ofCLIL in English academic writing teaching are positive.Despite the limitations of this empirical study, the successful application of CLIL inEnglish academic writing teaching also provides some valuable pedagogical implications:subject knowledge should be added more or less into English teaching according to thestudents’ English proficiency; English teachers and subject teachers should cooperate with each other to fulfill the task of combining English teaching with subject teaching; andteachers should also enrich input and provide the students with more output practice toimprove their English competence.