Abstract

The proposals of the European Union in the area of the language learning have produced fundamental results. Numerous linguistic projects and educative programmes have been implemented in order to address the linguistic deficits experienced by the European population. Within this context, an educational approach that is gaining ground is CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning). The main objective of this study is to compare the written proficiency of, together with errors made by, a group of Spanish secondary school students who followed a CLIL programme, with a similar group who followed an English as foreign language (EFL) programme. Both groups were between fifteen and sixteen-year-old tenth graders (fourth-course ESO in Spain). The written production of these groups was analysed and assessed, taking into consideration grammatical, lexical, orthographic, and discourse competences. The results obtained show that the CLIL students’ writing skills significantly surpassed those of the EFL students, thus proving the beneficial effect of bilingual programmes on their linguistic and communicative skills.