Multilingual and Multimodal Pedagogy and Assessment to Support Young Learners in CLIL

In Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), students learn content knowledge through their additional language (L2). While students may develop their L2 more effectively in CLIL, they need to overcome some challenges when mastering content knowledge through L2 academic language. Hence, teachers and students are encouraged to mobilise different languages and semiotic resources to communicate and construct knowledge in CLIL classrooms. Similarly, the mobilisation of multilingual and multimodal resources should be embraced in CLIL assessment, so that students can better demonstrate their learning outcomes. Yet, limited research has investigated multilingual and multimodal pedagogy and assessment in primary CLIL classrooms. This design-based research addressed this gap by planning and implementing multilingual and multimodal teaching across two cycles in a public primary school in China. Multilingual and multimodal assessment tasks, including one written test and one poster presentation task, were also experimented with the students. By comparing students’ performance on the written pre- and post-tests, together with data collected from lesson observations and student interviews, this study shows the effectiveness of the teacher’s multilingual and multimodal pedagogy in facilitating students’ content and L2 learning. While students’ performance on the multilingual and multimodal written post-test was not significantly different from that on the conventional written post-test, their content knowledge, spoken language and presentation skills, and creativity demonstrated through the poster design task were impressive. These findings not only help justify multilingual and multimodal pedagogy and assessment, but also illuminate CLIL pedagogy and assessment practices.