Using CLIL Approach to Improve English Language in a Colombian Higher Educational Institution

In Colombia, the development of communicative skills of English as a foreign language in students of Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) is considered as a priority so the professionals can face the challenges of a globalized world. This project aimed to determine the effectiveness of using CLIL approach through the academic subjects in first learning level students of a Nursing program. The research had a mixed quasi experimental design of a control group not equivalent with measurements before and after CLIL interventions, which consisted in accompanying and guidance to six teachers who instruct the seven subjects of the academic program in which the experimental group was. Along 17 applications designed from the 4C’s (Content, Cognition, Communication and Culture), and the methodology collaborative work, students showed a significant progress in using communicative and cognitive abilities according with the development performances. The used tests to evaluate students’ English level showed from the statistical data analysis, applying T-student test, that initiating the process the mean of the control group was significantly higher than the mean of the experimental group, and posteriorly to CLIL approach applications, a mean improvement of the experimental group was observed becoming statistically similar to the mean of the control group. The research results provide a pedagogical path to strengthen bilingualism processes and to contribute with graduate’s communicative competences in a foreign language.


Introduction
Colombia, like other countries, is a non-English speaking region which has started a process in the last two decades looking to fit more in a globalized world, to be competitive offering a wide intellectual group of professionals who can face the world's demands.This big purpose is built on the education system to improve personal, social and economic development on citizens (Ministerio de Educación Nacional [MEN], 2014), thus they can reach high levels in communicative competences in English.There is clearly a labor demand for professionals to learn this foreign language and it is expected that students in Higher Education Institutions (HEI) have a high English level (B2) according with the Common European Framework (CEFR).
Accordingly to Colombia's National Plan of Bilingualism, respecting the improvements that the country has done, and that are measured through international tests in which "Colombia moved from position 57 in 2005 to the 49 (among 72 countries) in 2016.Even though, the country upgraded 8 positions, it was not enough to locate itself in a better hierarchy (El Tiempo, 2016).
The National Education Ministry in Colombia has been focusing its strategies towards the HEIs so they can offer not only high quality but bilingual education through the implementation of educational projects, internationalizations processes, cultural interchanges, inclusion and teacher training.To accomplish all these challenges, the process of teaching English in non-English academic programs must be done taking in account students' need using new motivating and appropriated methodologies and innovating teaching approaches.The big aim which embraces the purpose of this project was to improve the institution's students with sufficient English Language skills so they can face, as complete professionals, the competition in a globalized world; furthermore, the results and outcomes become fundamental to generate an institution strategy that allows to develop academic processes using at least two different languages inside the HEI.
Another efficient strategy used in education through another language different from the mother tongue, is teaching training, and for this research, previous studies in the institution showed that it is really important to have competent teachers, develop academic material and focus in intercultural language learning so approaches like CLIL can be successful in Colombia.It has been demonstrated that integrating both, content and language, CLIL facilitates the access to personal and intercultural communication; this approach helps to develop language skills and offers new perspectives in teaching and learning languages (Pavesi et al, 2001).

CLIL (Content Language Integrated Learning)
This pedagogical approach uses cognitive processes using a different language."It refers to an educational context in which a foreign language (L2) is used as a means of teaching and learning content not related to the language itself" (Suárez, 2005).It arises from the taxonomy of Bloom, the zone of proximal development (ZPD) of Vygotsky, the active learning of Cummins (Valverde, 2015) and the theory of the multiple intelligences of Gardner (Morilla, 2014).
CLIL has as its principles, the scaffolding (Bentley, 2010), the use of different tasks (Beglar, 2002), a collaborative learning, the integration to different forms of learning and the common skills for all languages.Such principles are described through 4Cs: Content, that is, the areas of knowledge, Communication which refers to interaction, Cognition, as thinking skills and Culture, regarding the socio-cultural environment taking into account the differences and needs of the academic context.

CLIL Teachers
One of the recommended ways to develop as CLIL teachers is to belong to a learning community where everyone considers themselves to be apprentices.For this purpose, it is recommended that you work closely with a colleague or other expert teacher in CLIL, this process is known as LOCIT (Lesson Observation (LO) followed by the critical incident technique (CIT)) (Coyle, 2005).LOCIT involves the accompaniment agreed with the experienced teacher to observe the classes who gives a respective immediate feedback orally in order to carry out pedagogical support that will lead the content teacher to improve the CLIL applications.

Benefits of Using CLIL in Educational Institutions
The researches that were taken as referents for this project focus on the process of institutionalization of bilingualism through the CLIL approach and its consequences.Gutiérrez and Del Barrio (2013) recommend increasing group work in a collaborative way to improve linguistic competence and, at the same time, to integrate the pedagogical technique 'focus on form' in which "trainees must pay attention to the form intensively with the purpose of learning it.In this, the language is studied as an object, and the apprentice adopts the role of student rather than the user of a language" (Lucha, 2006).Teachers are recommended to systematically give feedback to students about the development of the foreign language.
According to the doctoral thesis of Pérez (2012), the benefits of CLIL do not refer only to the improvement in linguistic competence in L2 that is reached by the number of hours of exposure to it, but especially to the development of cognitive skills in the students due to they must use cognitive processes different from those they usually use to assimilate content in their mother tongue.Receptive skills, vocabulary, morphology, creativity, risk, fluency and attitude improvement are aspects that are especially reinforced with CLIL.Using this methodology, students consider themselves more aware of the formal aspects of the language and more efficient in strategic use, getting better in the process of discovering new concepts, and through this strategy, they also promote the skills involved in problem solving, spontaneity and motivation.
Among the benefits for content teachers is that they recognize the importance of language in the learning process that allows the academic language to be easily developed.The teachers involved take into account that the CLIL class is different from the traditional class and use other methodological approaches such as group work, task based projects and various forms of social learning, thus contributing to the conception of learning as a construction rather than an instruction, guiding students towards autonomous learning and in this way, introducing new ideas.The center and the environment of the institution also benefit because the educational institutions that promote CLIL are seen as modern schools where students are intensively prepared for the future and global work life.

Research Design
This is a mixed research with qualitative and quantitative components with a quasi-experimental design of a non-equivalent control group with before and after measures because it is not random and studies the cause-effect relationships but without rigorous control of the variables (Bono, 2012) .The quantitative data were obtained from the results of the English tests provided by the Cambridge publishing house through an agreement with the HIE language institute, which was applied both before and after the CLIL interventions; the qualitative data came from the information collected through the planning and application guides by the teachers.

Written Test
Two tests were used to evaluate (before and after) the level of English of the students.The Cambridge instrument consisted of 17 items through which performances are measured corresponding to the use of the present simple and present of be.

Monitoring format
It is an instrument to be filled by each teacher, in which is expressed in percentage the number of students who approved the exercises developed in the CLIL applications according to each of the 17 items in coherence with what the written test measures.This also records the time, the communicative skills used and the cognitive tools.

Lesson plannings and worksheets
Each of the 17 applications made by the first semester teachers of the Nursing program was planned according to the aspects of the CLIL approach, this work as well as the design of the worksheets was guided by an expert teacher through LOCIT.

Participants
The research was directed to 33 students of the Nursing program, on whom the strategy based on the CLIL approach was developed, in which six teachers were linked in seven subjects of the curriculum, and 30 students from other programs were taken as a comparison control group who did not received classes with this approach.
The total of 63 students were divided into three groups studying level 1 of English corresponding to level A1.1 of the CEFR guided by different teachers.In the HEI, the learning of English as a foreign language is organized in six levels (A1.1, A1.2, A2.1, A2.2, B1.1 and B1.2) that the students study in a flexible way throughout their professional training.The selection of this level is due to a diagnosis presented by the language institute of the HEI in which thematic gaps in this first level are observed that have an impact on the performance of the subsequent learning of the English language.In this population there were students of academic programs from the four faculties of the institution that is characterized by being in a small town in a Colombian department.

Procedure
The process began with the selection of the subjects, in which the CLIL activities were applied, then it was necessary to determine the topics and conversational strategies that were strengthened from the chosen subjects and that are coherent with the level of English that students from the sample object of this research were studying.The students of both, the experimental group and the control group presented the test of English knowledge.
For the work with the teachers, the general planning of the pedagogical strategy was carried out taking into account the four communicative skills of the language, and the topics and conversational strategies that were going to be strengthened.With them, the lesson plans were designed in coherence with the proposed strategy.Lastly, the designs made were applied, evaluating the students' performance through the follow-up of the interventions; once the academic period is over, the same students of the pretest presented the posttest.

Results
The results shown below respond to the problem of the research on the impact obtained through a strategy based on the CLIL approach for the strengthening of the foreign language communicative skills in students of a higher education institution, a Nursing program case.

Student English Competence
In the first instance, the determination of the competences in English as a foreign language existing in the students who were in level 1 for the semester 2017-1 is presented.In this group were the students of Nursing programs who formed the experimental group; likewise, the students belonging to the Nursing Introductory programs, Law, Electronic Engineering, Agricultural Engineering, repeaters of the level and some students, who have not completed the subjects of their study plan and needed to study the required levels of English, were taken as a control group.For this, a test was carried out before and after the implementation of the strategy based on the CLIL approach.The general results are shown in Table 1.For the pretest the mean of the experimental group was 41.48 with a standard deviation of 11.088 and the mean for the control group was 48.6 with a standard deviation of 13.374.For the posttest the mean of the experimental group was 63.58 with a standard deviation of 13.,825 and for the control group the mean was 69.07 with a standard deviation of 15.485, although the standard deviations were high for the two groups, this is greater for the control group, both in the pretest and in the posttest.
To specify if there is a significant difference between the mean scores of pretest and posttest, a t-test was conducted showing the results on Table 2. H1= There are significant differences between the means of G1 (exp) and G2 (control) sig ˂ 0.05.
H1o= There are no significant differences between the means of G1 (exp) y G2 (control) sig ˃ 0.05.
According to the hypotheses proposed (H1 and H1o), the value of the significance of 0.,024˂0.05shows that the null hypothesis can be rejected, so the means are different.In this case, the mean of the control group (48.6) is significantly higher than the mean of the experimental group (41.48).For the posttest P sig˃ 0.05 (0.,142) therefore, there is no evidence to reject the null hypothesis, so the means are similar.In this case, the mean of the control group (63.58) is similar to the mean of the experimental group (69.07).
From the statistical analysis of the data applying T-student test, it can be observed that at the beginning of the process, the mean of the control group was significantly higher than the mean of the experimental group, and after applying the CLIL strategy, it was observed an improvement of the experimental group, becoming statistically the same as the mean of the control group.
To check if there are significant differences between the pretest and the posttest of both the experimental group and the control group, before and after the application of CLIL, the T-student test is performed for related samples whose results are shown in Table 3.For both the experimental group and the control group, the value of P sig ˂ 0.05 therefore, there is evidence to reject the null hypothesis, so the means are significantly different, in this case the mean of the posttest is statistically higher than the mean of the pretest for the two groups, consequently this evidence that there was a learning process during the four months of difference between the dates of the pretest and the posttest due to the significant difference determined.

Results From CLIL Strategy Application
The strategy based on the CLIL approach consisted in the guidance and accompaniment of the six teachers who teach the seven subjects corresponding to the first semester of the Nursing program in which the experimental group was located.They developed a total of 17 applications in which the 4Cs are taken into account according to CLIL.Regarding the content in Table 4, the average number of students who approved the guidelines developed in the applications for 10 items (according to the relevance with the contents of the subjects of the Nursing program) is shown, of the 17 items evaluated in the pretest and posttest of the first level of English.In Figure 1, the emphasis of these applications is observed in relation to the four language skills, obtaining a greater frequency of applications in which students worked more developing Writing and Reading skills, followed by Listening, and in a lesser proportion, Speaking.Figure 2 shows the orientation towards the strengthening of the cognitive abilities proposed by Bloom (1971), which are classified as Low Order Thinking Skills (LOTS) and High Order Thinking Skills (HOTS).Regarding LOTS, for these the order of frequency of use in the applications from highest to lowest were Understanding (LU), Applying (LA) and Remembering (LR); and for the HOTS, the order of frequency of use in applications from highest to lowest is Analyzing (HA), Creating (HC) and Evaluating (HE).
Another important aspect in learning a foreign language is the time of exposure to it.Through the applications, the students of the experimental group had 610 more minutes of exposure to the English language than the students of the control group.

Result From the Evaluated Items on Pre and Posttest
Below, the results from the codes of the items described in Table 4 are shown in Tables 5, 6 and 7.In Table 5, where the results of the pretest are found, it is observed that the control group presented a highest average in most of the items except for item A. Regarding standard deviations, these vary from one group to the other.To check if there are significant differences of the results by item between the pretest and the posttest, both of the experimental group and the control group, before and after the application of CLIL, the T-student test is performed for related samples whose results are shown in Table 7. Table 7 shows that the mean of the posttest is significantly higher than the mean of the pretest for both the experimental group and the control group for items B, D, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O , P and Q.For the experimental group, the mean of the posttest is significantly higher than the mean of the pretest in the items E and F, while for the control group, the average of the posttest is similar to the pretest.For the control group, the mean of the posttest is significantly higher than the mean of the pretest in items A and C, while for the experimental group, the mean of the posttest is similar to the pretest.

Discussion
The academic characteristics of the students who participated in the research are different in relation to the level of initial competence in the English foreign language, as it is evidenced by the high standard deviation of each group for the pretest.In the control group some students had certain pre-knowledge in English and some had a few or no knowledge at all, this was due to several students who were in level 1 of English had completed part of the first level of knowledge in this language or were repeaters.This characteristic is reflected in the results of the pretest, where the control group obtained in several items better results, as well as in the average of the test with respect to the experimental group.In the posttest, the means for both groups are statistically similar showing that after the CLIL applications, the experimental group managed to improve in the results and that the exercise of this approach helped the experimental group to reach the level of the control group.According to the standard deviation in the posttest, its increase shows that learning was further enhanced in those who had communicative bases as in the case of the control group, according to Mayer (cited by Díaz & Hernández, 2002), the integration is a learning process in which, through class strategies, use of previous knowledge is made in order to transfer them to working memory, in this way external connections are established between the new information that arrives and the previous knowledge that it is owned.Integrated cognitive processes are related to the coherent organization of what it has been learned, resulting in greater effectiveness in learning compared to those who do not have these.
In the pretest, it is evident for each of the 17 items evaluated that the control group obtained a higher mean than the experimental group, while in the posttest the experimental group reached the levels of the control group and specially outstands in the items A (To understand a simple present situation through listening), D (To use appropriately of the expressions me too or me neither in written conversations), and H (To properly construct information questions using the simple present).The first item A and last H were worked on and reinforced by the experimental group through 3 and 6 applications respectively through the exercises based on the CLIL approach.Likewise, when determining if there were significant differences of the results by item between the pretest and the posttest, both of the experimental group and the control group, before and after the application of CLIL, through the T-student test, it was evidenced that the experimental group has significant differences for items A and C (To determine the specific words of the use of the language of a simple present tense and the present tense of the verb be), where item C was also reinforced through the CLIL approach through 2 applications.
These differences are explained from the design of the CLIL applications.For the plan of these applications, the guide established by Coyle, Hood and Marsh (2010) was used: 1).At first, it was necessary to define the content, which consisted of the topics of each subject of the first semester of Nursing.
2).This content was linked to the communication, for which the use of the four communicative language skills was taken into account, with greater emphasis on the productive skill of Writing and on the receptive skill of Reading, in coherence with the items G (To adequately answer information questions using the simple present), and Q (To include short texts in simple present) that were the most frequent between the activities of the 17 applications made.These items are among those that reported scores approved for the experimental group both in the interventions of the CLIL activities and in the posttest.
3).Then, the type of cognitive abilities was explored, according to Bloom's taxonomy (1971) among which the most used were Understanding (LU) and Applying (LA) classified as Low Order Thinking Skills (LOTS) because "each simpler category is prerequisite to mastery of the next more complex one " (Krathwohl, 2002), and consequently to be able to make use of the Analyzing (HA) and Creating (HC) skills framed within the High Order Thinking Skills (HOTS).
4).Finally, the aspect of culture is established contextually as a thread that weaves a path through the development of each application, it is like a circle that surrounds the topic.For the design of the activities, they were based on the context of each selected content to be developed in class.
As evidenced by the results obtained, the CLIL approach, according to Richards and Rodgers (2014), allows students to learn the language and content at the same time and always, in a natural way.Its focus is on students process in "learning by doing", so they develop more successfully their communicative skills of a foreign language when they use the language as a means to understand the content rather than an end in itself, and since the content provides the basis to activate the cognitive and interactive processes that are the starting point of learning another language, the knowledge is interwoven to be more meaningful.
The methodology of accompaniment to the content teacher by a teacher specialized in CLIL in order to perform the LOCIT structure (Lesson Observation (LO) followed by the critical incident technique (CIT)) was successful and allowed self-management of teaching in class using a foreign language, allowing participating teachers to recognize their strengths and weaknesses, and student participation in shared learning to encourage complementary research by professionals accompanied by colleagues and students inside and outside of schools (Coyle, 2011).

Conclusion
The CLIL approach is presented as an efficient alternative that allows to strengthen the communicative competences of the English as a foreign language when being introduced in classes as a medium of instruction.The research showed an improvement that allowed the experimental group of students of the first semester of the Nursing program, which had an initial disadvantage, to reinforce their abilities and achieve better results in the final test, leveling with the control group as it is evidenced in a comparative between the pre and posttest results.
In general, the results in both tests are similar to the averages in the control group, but taking into account the diversity of the groups, not only in academic programs but also in academic level, the exercise of the CLIL methodology is highlighted which helped significantly to the experimental group, which did not have good bases in the English language, to level out the knowledge in almost all the items in the posttest.Likewise, it is highlighted that in the items of the tests, the experimental group increased more in its values of the mean, largely thanks to the use of the CLIL approach and the extra exposure that this group had to the English language.
Through LOCIT it is possible to make a joint effort among teachers for the development of teachers trained in the CLIL methodology when working with a master expert in this approach who accompanies the process through observation and guidance, with the content teacher.This LOCIT structure allows the teacher to continue reflecting on his practice thanks to the immediate oral feedback and personalized advice.With this support, the teachers of the first semester of the Nursing program made the planning of each intervention taking into account the 4Cs (content, cognition, communication and culture), as well as the three moments of the class (before, during and after) assuming as guidelines the objectives of content and achievements proposed for it.
Of these, the most frequent are G (To adequately answers information questions using the simple present), and Q (To include short texts in simple present).The averages of items G, Q, I (To use correctly the prepositions and place expressions to describe the position of objects), J (To use the auxiliary Do and Does and the conjugation of the verbs properly), and N (To conjugates the verbs properly in simple present) are those that are considered satisfactory with respect to the number of students who approved them.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Development of the fours language skills Figure 2. Development of the cognitive skills

Table 1 .
Descriptive statistics of students' English competence

Table 2 .
The result of t-test on pretest-postest

Table 3 .
Paired samples statistics of result of t-test on pretest-posttest

Table 4 .
Percentage of students that approved the CLIL applications

Table 5 .
Descriptive statistics students' performance at pretest

Table 6 ,
in which the posttest results are observed, shows that the experimental group presents higher means than the control group in the results of the items A, D and H for the posttest; for the rest of the items, very similar means are shown for the two groups.

Table 6 .
Descriptive statistics students' performance at posttest

Table 7 .
Paired Samples Statistics of result of performance