THE IMPACT OF CONTENT AND LANGUAEG INTEGRATED LEARNING (CLIL) ON EFL LEARNERS' READING COMPREHENSION

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of content and language integrated learning (CLIL) on English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' reading comprehension. Seventy Iranian students who studied at Azad University of Shiraz participated in this study. Their major was English language teaching. At first, they were divided into two groups, CLIL and non-CLIL groups. Then, they took part in the pre-test in order to ensure there was no statistically significant difference between the two groups. Learners in CLIL group took teaching methodology course. But, learners in non-CLIL group took reading comprehension course. A framework which was used for both groups was scaffolding reading experience (SRE) model (Graves & Graves, 2003). The main difference between the two groups was the content which was selected for them. At the end of the semester, the learners took part in the post-test. The results indicated that CLIL method improved EFL learners' reading comprehension skill as p-value was 0.04 (p < 0.05), and learners in CLIL group performed better than non-CLIL group.