The Role of the Students in the CLIL Classroom A New Perspective to Identify Types of Tasks

A good deal of authors have spotted the crucial factors to get into account in order to classify tasks for their study. Although the role of the student in the task has been studied before, it has not been considered as a key factor in some of the most influential models. I propose a new perspective to describe it. It consists in a combination of the participation of the students in the input of tasks and their participation in the output. A case study has been carried out to address the statistical effects of the factor proposed in two variables: the amount of As-units (Foster, Tonkyn, & Wigglesworth, 2000) in the L2 produced in the classroom, and among them, the amount of initiating moves (Leech & Weisser, 2003). Transcripts of the audio and video recordings taken during eight CLIL Science lessons taught to an intact class of ten students of grades 1 and 2 were analysed. The results showed that the role of the students in the input had a significant effect on the variables measured. The teacher produced more As-units in general and initiating moves in particular, while the students produced less As-units while still producing more initiating moves.