This paper reports data from a study recently carried out with university language students attending a Master’s degree programme in Language Sciences. The study aimed at exploring to what extent logbook writing could allow them to progress in their learner autonomy by engaging in more reflective, conscious, and responsible second/foreign language learning. The class was asked first to write a logbook for a week with the purpose of keeping track of their personal language learning process and then to answer some reflective questions to give an account of their perception about the logbook experience. By taking an interpretive approach to the investigation and adopting qualitative data analysis, it was found that the logbook was generally perceived as useful in improving language learning and stimulating meta-cognitive reflection, self-awareness and learner’s intervention. While limits were identified in the use of this tool (i.e., persistence needed to regularly keep logs, time availability and appropriate organisation skills), some students declared their intention to use the logbook in the future, after making personalised adjustments according to their learning needs and goals.

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The integration of CLIL programmes in the curriculum implies substantial choices that each teacher often performs individually, in the absence of ministerial directives that indicate which topics or contents to focus on. The present study aimed at investigating how CLIL teachers are addressing this need, what kind of factual selection they make both at the level of the disciplinary syllabus and at the level of the general curriculum, what guides their choices and what their motivations are. The objective of the research was to possibly identify commonalities that could sustain new CLIL teachers in their future curricular planning.

One of the aims of language learning is that learners can apply outside the classroom what they learn at school and, vice versa, can use in classroom what comes from their experience in ‘real’ life, that is, outside school walls. However, as nearly a century of experimental research on the field has proved, knowledge transfer does not occur spontaneously, on the contrary, this capacity seems to be particularly complicated and difficult to encourage. It is therefore crucial to help learners gain awareness and make use of existing language learning opportunities as well as the learning strategies they can employ so to increase their capacity to make connections. Among the different tools that can be used to enhance both language competence and metacognitive awareness, logbook is considered one of the most handy and purposeful. This paper will try to explain what a logbook is and how it can be used with students with the intention to promote their language learning both in and out of the classroom.

The aim of the study here presented was to understand to what extent CLIL materials are oriented towards the development of learning strategies (cognitive, metacognitive and socio-affective strategies). This was done through the analysis of teaching materials of different content subject areas for primary and secondary school levels. A qualitative approach was adopted to compare learning units taken from commercial CLIL textbooks alongside self-authored materials created by CLIL teachers for their classes. A set of informative data was gathered to detect which strategies were most developed, whether any relevant differences between the materials analysed could be spotted, and whether strategy instruction was implicit or explicit. Main findings show that the types of strategies found in CLIL materials are very similar to those applied in second and foreign language learning environments and, although no significant differences have been spotted between textbooks and self-authored materials as to strategy instruction, the data has provided some interesting insights which deserve further exploration. It is hoped that the work will shed some light on practices of effective integration of learning strategies in CLIL teaching.