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In:Early Language Education in Instructed Contexts: Current issues and empirical insights into teaching and learning languages in primary school
Edited by Stefanie Frisch and Karen Glaser
[Language Learning & Language Teaching 62] 2025
► pp. 160–183

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Chapter 8
Young learners’ verbal reports of their writing strategies when composing an explanatory text in CLIL science

 | University of Murcia
 | University of Murcia
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 22 May 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lllt.62.08coy
Abstract
The present study investigates the writing strategies which 22 nine-to-ten-year-old learners reported having employed after producing an explanatory text in L2 English as part of a CLIL science project with embedded literacy instruction. Pre-writing and stimulated recall interviews were used to elicit information on the learners’ thinking about their writing, which was coded using categories (e.g., retrieval, restructuring) drawn from the research literature (e.g., Macaro, 2007). The results revealed that children’s writing strategies were influenced by individual, task-related, and contextual factors. Pedagogical implications highlight the importance of raising young learners’ metalinguistic and metacognitive knowledge of L2 writing.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Context and participants
    • 3.2Procedure for literacy instruction in CLIL science
    • 3.3Data collection: The writing task and the interviews
    • 3.4Data analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Global and local planning
    • 4.2Text formulation
    • 4.3Revision
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Global and local planning
    • 5.2Text formulation strategies
    • 5.3Revision strategies
  • 6.Conclusion
  • References
References (37)
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