This paper focuses on a specific content and language integrated learning (CLIL) programme where the additional language, Spanish, is also the heritage language (HL) of 25% of the students. Drawing on interview data, this paper focuses on students’ experiences and perceptions of this CLIL programme. The results are somewhat homogeneous; students have a high level of satisfaction with the bilingual subjects but express strong complaints about the lack of differentiation techniques in language classrooms. Accordingly, while this CLIL programme is overall very successful, with regard to HL maintenance and boosting students’ self-esteem, it has yet to achieve its full potential.
Dieser Artikel befasst sich mit einem speziellen CLIL-Programm, bei dem die Zielsprache Spanisch auch die Herkunftssprache von etwa 25 % der Lernenden darstellt. Auf der Grundlage von Interviewdaten geht dieser Beitrag der Frage nach den Erfahrungen und Wahrnehmungen dieser Lernenden mit dem CLIL-Programm nach. Die Ergebnisse zeigen ein übereinstimmendes Bild mit einem hohen Maß an Zufriedenheit bezüglich der bilingualen Fächer, aber auch mit einem deutlichen Mangel an Differenzierungstechniken. Insgesamt erweist sich das CLIL-Programm zwar als äußerst erfolgreich, insbesondere was die Erhaltung der Herkunftssprache und das Selbstwertgefühl der Lernenden betrifft, sein volles Potenzial wird jedoch noch nicht ausschöpft.
With its 24 official languages, multilingualism lies at the heart of the European Union (EU). A fundamental priority for member states is therefore fostering language learning from an early age and throughout one’s lifespan to achieve the EU’s declared goal for every European citizen, i.e., to learn – and to be able to use – at least two additional languages (cf.
Since 2002, all languages, not only the official languages of member states, have been recognized and included in the EU’s multilingual strategy. However, efforts for supporting and maintaining the language(s) that children and young adults first acquire in their countries of origin or within their families have typically been lacking and often limited to nice words and good intentions. This is clearly evident in vague formulations, such as "different mother tongues […] should be valued more highly" (
The same issues specifically inform the promotion of heritage languages
There are currently approximately 400,000 people living in Germany with the nationality of a Spanish-speaking country. This gives a rather approximate idea of the number of L1 Spanish speakers, as there are only reliable statistics for citizens’ nationality, not for their languages, or for how these citizens categorize them (as L1, L2… or as HL). Censuses by age group are equally unreliable. As far as nationality is concerned, only Spanish nationality offers available and complete datasets for the number of children and young people under the age of 18, which is approximately 25,000. In any case, it is clear that these figures are extremely small, far less than the numbers of HL speakers of Turkish, Russian or Serbo-Croatian and sharply different from the number of Spanish speakers in the United States. Moreover, the Spanish-speaking population in Germany is spread throughout the country, unlike, for example, Danish or Polish speakers, who are (more) concentrated in the border areas of Northeastern and Eastern Germany, respectively. Thus, the range of publicly funded Spanish HL instruction is similarly small and limited to two modalities: "mother tongue classes" organized by the regional governments of five (of sixteen) federal states, i.e., Brandenburg, North Rhine-Westphalia, Lower Saxony, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saxony, and the language classes offered by the Spanish Embassy in its ALCE
However, it is also clear that not every young person with Spanish as a HL takes advantage of the possibility of receiving language instruction. Reliable data concerning this supply – demand ratio is scarce, but in the federal state of Hamburg, for example, in 2019/20, 230 of a total of 1,200 Spanish children between 6–17 years old were enrolled in ALCE classrooms (cf.
Accordingly, the majority of young Spanish heritage speakers ultimately attend the regular Spanish foreign language classes that are offered as school subjects. The advantages of these are obvious: Lessons take place in the same school building during school hours and form part of a student’s school curriculum. Unfortunately, the challenges that these mixed classes offer to teachers and learners (cf.
The aforementioned difficulties young people face in obtaining formal instruction in their HL express a deeper, increasingly global problem related to language education in Europe:
Historically, the objectives of schools across the world have been to form homogeneous groups of people, bringing them closer to a national language standard. One of the consequences of such objectives is that minority-language students have been discouraged from using their mother tongue or even from learning new languages. At the same time, the limited selection of foreign languages offered by schools, taught in isolation from other disciplines, has prevented most students from developing effective plurilingualism (
A possible solution to these problems is the content and language integrated learning (CLIL) model, which combines teaching academic content or school subjects with the use and learning of two other languages: a school’s official language and an additional language. This approach gives both language and nonlanguage content the same level of importance, "even if the emphasis is greater on one or the other at a given time" (
The European Parliament (
Accordingly, this article focuses on a school that offers a CLIL programme in Spanish for both heritage and nonheritage speakers, similar to that of the SESB. In contrast to the SESB quantitative study (cf.
How does the CLIL programme – according to its participants – contribute to the maintenance and development of participants’ HL?
What are the participants’ experiences with CLIL subjects? What learning difficulties and benefits do they report?
What conclusions can be drawn from the results of teaching an HL in other contexts?
The study was carried out at Sophie Scholl Comprehensive School,
This bilingual instruction is attended by three groups of children: those with a Spanish-speaking background (approximately 25%), those who have attended a bilingual primary school in their neighbourhood and children who have not previously studied Spanish but will receive an intensive course prior to the 5th grade. The first group is called "bilingual" or "native speakers", while the second and third groups are referred to as ELE
In 2017, 11 volunteer bilingual students from the 6th, 8th and 10th grades were interviewed about their overall multilingual experiences and their perspectives and attitudes towards the CLIL programme. The first set of questions was related to the participants’ language biography and current use of Spanish in their daily life. The second block focused first on the school and aimed to obtain information about the students’ understanding of what CLIL means and how it is implemented. Specifically, students were asked about their reasons for choosing the bilingual programme and their willingness to continue in it and about their favourite subjects. Second, certain aspects of learning Spanish and learning content and the relationship between these were discussed. Finally, questions related to their personal advantages and disadvantages of the bilingual model were asked. Notably, regular Spanish classes were not a subject in the interview guide.
The interviews had a total length of 148 minutes and were analysed following a qualitative content analysis methodology (cf.
In contrast to previous analyses (cf.
The four 6th grade students – Alina, Beatriz, Diana and Elena – are between 11 and 12 years old and were born in Germany or – as in the case of Elena – came to Germany at a very young age. All four girls use Spanish on a daily basis, mostly at home but also with friends, and they feel a very personal connection with it. They all state their Spanish is quite good, but not as good as they would like it to be. The central category of
None of the students had attended a Spanish primary school or Spanish classes offered by the Spanish embassy before entering this bilingual school; it is their first contact with both Spanish classes and Spanish as the language of instruction. For Alina and Diana, this school is also their first contact with European Spanish, which is considered the standard variety, i.e., the one in which schoolbooks are written and teachers speak. Therefore, these students perceive the Latin American variety of Spanish as less valuable than European Spanish:
When asked whether attending this school, in general, helps them improve their Spanish, all the students have ambivalent feelings and make clear distinctions. On the one hand, Spanish language lessons have a foreign language textbook at their core and are perceived to be undemanding, with the keywords „einfach“ [easy] and „langweilig“ [boring] clearly standing out in the interviews:
When asked if they have any suggestions for improving the CLIL programme, both Beatriz and Elena express a desire, rather unusual for a schoolchild, to be challenged more than they actually are:
Diana is the only one who does not criticize the language lessons and who underscores her writing improvements:
Clearly, bilingual students are attending classes well below their level, and they could benefit much more from learning together with the ELE students if their learning needs were specifically addressed.
As explained above, with regard to bilingual subjects, half of the instruction time is in German and half is in Spanish.
These two facts, the separation between languages on the one hand and the repetition of contents on the other, are not questioned by the heritage speakers. Comments generally focus on the issue of increased difficulty instead.
Diana even complains about the general difficulty of the Spanish subjects:
Although it is clear that Biology and Society are not among the students' favourite subjects, the fact that they are taught in Spanish makes them somewhat more attractive:
The students also perceive a clear difference between the nonspecialized vocabulary that they use at home and the academic language that they encounter in school subjects. This becomes very clear in Alina and Diana’s accounts:
These fragments also reveal a strong tendency to equate language learning with vocabulary. This becomes pervasive in the data, as will be shown in the analysis of the 8th and 10th grade interviews.
The group of 8th grade students is made up of Alejandro, Emilia and Aitana. Alejandro and Emilia were born in a Spanish-speaking country and came to Germany at the age of 5. In the case of Alejandro, both parents are Spaniards, but Emilia’s mother is Peruvian and her father is German. Aitana was born in Germany and speaks Spanish with her mother and Italian with her father. These multilingual and multicultural familiar backgrounds are a clear reflection of the diversity of German society.
When asked about their language practices, all respond that they actively speak Spanish at home and, similar to the 6th grade interviewees, that learning Spanish is important for them for familial and identity reasons:
Interestingly, they also find that speaking two or more languages is an asset that can help them find a job in the future, an aspect that was absent from the 6th grade responses. Alejandro, moreover, even mentions a concrete profession:
Gaps between their oral and written language abilities and between their everyday and academic vocabularies becomes as relevant here as it was in the 6th grade interviews. This indicates that the students still observe a difference between their Spanish knowledge as heritage speakers, which is fundamentally oral, and school demands, even two years after entering the bilingual programme:
The 8th grade students' perceptions of Spanish classes as „zu einfach“ [too easy], „langsam“ [slow-paced] and „manchmal ein bisschen langweilig“ [sometimes a bit boring] also coincide with those of the 6th grade students. Similarly, the interviewees rate their learning in CLIL classes as being much more satisfactory because the vocabulary and content are new to them and are taught at the ,right‘ level of difficulty. Interestingly, Alejandro complains that in Spanish classes, the topics are just „die man normalerweise nimmt. Zum Beispiel Kleidung oder Essen“ [the usual ones, for example clothes and meals] and he suggests that the lessons should also include „etwas, was wir in Gesellschaft machen“ [something like the things we do in Society] (Alejandro, 8th, §106-107). Students report that they learn as much in Biology and Society as their peers who do not participate in the bilingual programme. That they are taught the same subject in two languages does not, in their opinion, imply a slower learning pace. Moreover, the partial repetition of content, once in German and once in Spanish, is considered „schön“ [nice] (Emilia, 8th, §69) and useful for learning:
Furthermore, they perceive the division into two groups (into bilingual or ELE learners) to be very positive:
Above, 6th grader Diana found learning
In addition to benefiting from having L1 peers, learning
Emilia’s report therefore constitutes a lively example of translanguaging practices in the classroom (cf.
Thus far, we have described very similar responses in the 6th and 8th grade interviews, with the individual cases of Diana and Emilia as the ‘extremes’ among a very homogeneous set of learners. Now, we turn to the group of older students.
The participants in the 10th grade interviews were Mario and Lucia (simultaneous bilinguals and children of mixed couples) and Sergio and Paula, (sequential bilinguals who arrived in Germany a few years before the interviews took place). These different (linguistic) biographies determine different expectations and clearly lead to different experiences with the bilingual programme in particular and with the school system in general.
Mario and Lucia present themselves as good, self-confident students who do not have specific difficulties at school. For Paula and Sergio, the situation is quite different. Both have had the experience of leaving their home country as adolescents and have had to cope with the educational, personal and affective difficulties that this entails. Paula’s case is particularly representative of this, because she is no longer living with her mother (whom she accompanied to Germany) but with her best friend’s family. Moreover, Sergio reports that he is transferring to a vocational school at the end of the current school year.
Regarding their use of Spanish, Paula and Sergio consider themselves learners of German who feel more at ease speaking Spanish, the language they refer to as their „Muttersprache“ [mother tongue] or just „meine Sprache“ [my language]. On the other hand, Mario and Lucia refer to themselves as bilinguals who grew up with two languages. They state that their Spanish is „auf einem guten Niveau“ [at a good level] but articulate that there is always something to improve, for example, „mehr so Fachwörter“ [more so technical words] (Mario, 10th, §43) and they want to speak Spanish „perfekt, eigentlich“ [perfectly, actually]:
Spanish is also present in their daily life; they speak it at home, with their Spanish-speaking relatives and with some friends. Lucia has been attending Spanish classes organized by the embassy since 2nd grade, and they both are „sehr glücklich“ [very happy] at being bilingual, mentioning only positive aspects of this, such as having a secret code or „sich mit allen verständigen“ [communicate with everyone]. When asked about the disadvantages of or problems from living with two languages, Lucia and Mario are unable to describe any. According to Mario, to know several languages is „gut“ [good ] and „das bringt auch einen im Leben weiter“ [that gets you further in life] (Mario, 8th, §37). This fully optimistic vision coincides with the generally positive and confident tone of their interviews.
Unsurprisingly and similar to their 6th and 8th grade counterparts, these four students report that the Spanish language lessons are „leicht“ and „simple“ [easy] for them:
Here, Paula makes two new and very interesting points. On the one hand, she refers to herself as belonging to the "bilinguals", although, while speaking about her linguistic biography, she never referred to herself in this way. In fact, Paula preferred the interview to be conducted in Spanish. It is therefore clear that when she speaks about herself as a bilingual, Paula refers only to the school context. In addition, it is only when she discusses the language lessons that something like self-confidence emerges from her account. The second interesting issue she addresses is her difficulty learning an explicit grammatical rule. This is a problem that neither the 6th grade nor the 8th grade participants mentioned, but it also appears in Lucia’s and Mario’s interviews:
Although it is unclear exactly what Mario refers to regarding "knowing the past tenses", he likely refers to the specific linguistic terminology and explicit rules for using a particular past tense, which a ‘native’ speaker without formal grammatical instruction similar to that offered in language lessons usually does not know.
Regarding the CLIL programme, the students’ focus differs depending on their linguistic backgrounds and, therefore, on their current linguistic needs and priorities. However, all the comments about CLIL subjects are overwhelmingly positive. Paula’s and Sergio’s view of CLIL classes reveals how learning
Lucia’s and Mario’s interviews convey the impression that the students truly value the lessons and, once more, the Spanish language is a decisive, appealing factor. For instance, when asked if he would prefer to have all subjects taught only in German, Mario's answer is unequivocal: „Ich glaube, das wäre mir irgendwie ein bisschen zu langweilig, immer das Gleiche zu machen, in der gleichen Sprache“ [I think it would be a bit too boring for me, to always do the same thing in the same language] (Mario, 10th, §91). Discussing the possibility of having Chemistry as a CLIL subject, Lucia expresses a keen interest, precisely because of the language:
Mario and Lucia, furthermore, emphasize how CLIL subjects are particularly useful for maintaining their Spanish. They state that in these lessons, they learn more, specifically, more new words and more useful vocabulary, as Lucia elaborates:
This revealing quote is the only part of any interview that mentions the key element of CLIL, i.e., teaching a subject from two different perspectives to help enrich students' understanding of the world and foster intercultural understanding. This is also the only quote that lacks a reference to the repetition of content in two languages; rather, it articulates complementing and enriching views. However, even here, the cultural dimension is overshadowed by a connection, almost an equation, between learning (of Spanish history, in this case) and vocabulary.
CLIL programmes in languages other than English are rare in Germany and throughout Europe. Formal instruction in HLs is even more so. Thus, the present study has focused on one German school that combines both approaches to shed light on Spanish HL students’ experiences with this very unique learning environment.
The results illustrate a very homogeneous picture. First, for all participants in the interviews, being able to speak Spanish, i.e., being bilingual, as they are called and call themselves, is considered an asset and closely linked to their own identity. Moreover, the vast majority of them expressed their desire to continue improving their language skills in Spanish. In this context, the models of monolingual and peninsular Spanish native speakers as ideal- and ought-to-selves exert an important influence (cf.
Closely related to these considerations is the role of the school in their learning process. Interestingly, although Spanish is the regular foreign language taught at the school and Spanish language classes are certainly not exclusive to the bilingual itinerary, students always include Spanish language classes as part of their CLIL programme. Moreover, the comments imply that there is a striking lack of differentiation techniques, as the students usually refer to the classes in terms of ease and boredom. One recurrent positive issue the students mention is their comprehension of the writing system (spelling and punctuation), which they do not learn at home, and – in the case of the 10th grade interviewees – their explicit learning of grammatical rules, which helps them to reflect on linguistic issues and develop language awareness.
Regarding CLIL subjects (Biology, Music, Social Sciences), the results indicate that the students are quite happy with the school’s separation of ,bilingual‘ and ,ELE-learners‘, as it seems to warrant the differentiation that they miss in their language classes. Nonetheless, the separation into groups would plausibly make more sense for Spanish classes, and all students would benefit more from learning together during CLIL lessons. Students also fully support the division of the bilingual classes into German and Spanish sections; however, judging by the students’ responses, this is conducive to the repetition of content and highlights the extraordinary importance of vocabulary in their learning experiences. In fact, equating vocabulary to learning is a striking constant in the interviews.
The students are also aware of the distinction, made by Cummins (
In conclusion, this content and heritage language integrated learning programme is and remains an exception, and it will be difficult to expand this model to other schools and other languages. However, the findings provide two important considerations for teaching HL. First, regarding mixed language classrooms with heritage and nonheritage language students, a language awareness approach with yet-to-be-developed differentiated tasks seems to be highly appropriate. Second, with regard to the HL classes as extracurricular activities, a CLIL approach that integrates subject contents and different cultural perspectives would be an appealing new way of fostering heritage speakers’ academic and intercultural abilities, in accordance with the recommendations and demands of the European language policy.
For a discussion about the term "heritage languages" and its risks, see Potowski/Shin (
ALCE is an acronym for Aulas de Lengua y Cultura Españolas.
CLIL should be understood as one form of bilingual or plurilingual education (cf.
The names of all participants are pseudonyms.
That is the term the students use to refer to Social Studies.
ELE stands for Español Lengua Extranjera (Spanish as a Foreign Language).
For a more detailed description of the study, which also comprised interviews with ELE learners, see García García (
Literal translation by the author.
With the exception of „Music and Culture“, which is taught only in Spanish.
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Seminar für Romanische Philologie
Humboldtallee 19
37073 Göttingen