Motivation in multilingual CLIL: differences in male and female learners

Abstract Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has rapidly expanded across Europe in recent years; however, English has largely stolen the limelight as the language of instruction, with other target languages (TLs) receiving little attention. Furthermore, while factors such as motivation have been found to play an even more important role in CLIL, it is unclear whether this is so in English as well as in other TLs, given the qualitative difference between the motivation towards English as compared to other TLs. It has also been suggested that, while female students generally report higher motivation, CLIL may help to blur gender differences, as male learners may compensate for lower language learning motivation with higher motivation towards the subject they are studying. However, there is again a lack of research on whether this is the case in multiple TLs in CLIL. This study thus aims to explore these three factors, multilingual CLIL, motivation and gender, to determine whether higher motivation towards English is observed in multilingual CLIL, and whether this factor is dependent on the learners’ gender. Findings suggest that although males and females have comparable motivation towards each TL, differences arise particularly in terms of language anxiety and instrumentality. Pseudo-longitudinal analysis also reveals greater differences for males in French, while males’ English motivation and females’ motivation in both TLs were comparable across grades.