Language proficiency and study achievement of pupils with dyslexia enrolled in content and language integrated learning (CLIL)

To date, very little research has been conducted on the inclusiveness of CLIL for pupils with learning disorders. The current study investigated whether pupils with dyslexia may also benefit from a CLIL experience or whether reading disorders should rather be considered as a risk factor for attending CLIL. To address this question, 28 5th and 11th-grade pupils with diagnosed dyslexia and 112 matched controls were identified within a sample of over 800 participants recruited in French-speaking Belgium. A first analysis showed that CLIL pupils with dyslexia had similar participation rates as those schooled in traditional education. Secondly, our study provided no clear evidence for the intuition that dyslexia could have a more detrimental effect on French literacy in CLIL than in non-CLIL pupils. For the target language (i.e. Dutch or English), our findings were not entirely conclusive as to the linguistic advantage of CLIL pupils with dyslexia. Finally, the acquisition of academic content in a CLIL setting was comparable for both typically reading pupils and pupils with dyslexia. Overall, our findings suggest that there is no measurable disadvantage for pupils with dyslexia to attend CLIL, neither for language learning, nor for acquiring academic content.