Can engaging university students in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) increase their achievement in Biology and English language? The current study explored the effectiveness of team teaching enhanced CLIL on student achievement. Framed in interdisciplinary/cross-curricular teaching, we examined the effect of CLIL strategy on student achievement in a quasi-experimental study with a sample of Biology education students (N = 25) assigned to control and experimental groups. The topic taught through CLIL was the digestive system, and this subject knowledge was used to test the students’ achievement in Biology. Along with t-test and Mann-Whitney U-test a non-parametric ANCOVA was carried out to reveal group differences. We found that engaging in CLIL significantly improved student achievement both in Biology subject knowledge and English language. We highlight the critical role of CLIL in teaching content and language for science subjects such as Biology at university level.

<p>Despite the current importance given to L2 vocabulary acquisition in the last two decades, considerable<br />deficiencies are found in L2 students’ vocabulary size. One of the aspects that may influence vocabulary<br />learning is word frequency. However, scholars warn that frequency may lead to wrong conclusions if the way<br />words are distributed is ignored. That is to say, it seems that not only the number of occurrences (frequency)<br />might affect L2 vocabulary acquisition, but also the way occurrences are distributed (distribution). This<br />relationship between these two factors is represented by the so-called Gries’ index, known as dispersion. The<br />present study aims to find out whether dispersion is more an accurate and reliable predictor for L2 vocabulary<br />learning than frequency only.</p>

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The semantic prosody of the words inmigración and inmigrante in the Spanish written media: A corpus-based study of two national newspapers AbstractSeveral studies, such as the one carried out by Checa and Arjona (2011), show the negative view of the Spanish media towards immigration from a social perspective, in which immigration is conceived as a threat and an invasion that causes fear and hostility. However, this negative view has been barely analysed from a linguistic perspective. In particular, this study aims to explore the semantic prosody of the Spanish lexical items inmigración (immigration) and inmigrante (immigrant) in written media. For this purpose, an ad hoc corpus of news on the phenomenon of immigration has been compiled. News between 2003 and 2013 from two national newspapers with different political ideology (El Mundo and El País) were collected. The analysis of the news was carried out with WordSmith, a corpus analysis software which enabled us to observe the co-occurrences of the words inmigrante and inmigración. The results reveal that most of the words co-occurring with inmigrante and inmigración have an unfavourable meaning. These results confirm those of sociological studies which have found a feeling of rejection towards the phenomenon of immigration. Therefore, our results evidence how this negative feeling is also represented in the media discourse.