A brief CV

Bianca Manuela Sandu is an Assistant Lecturer of English at the Faculty of Philolgy in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC) where she has been teaching in the Modern Languages Department for four years. She has been carrying out research in lexical availability in Spanish and English as foreign languages for more than ten years and she now researches and writes about the L2 Motivational Self System and its impact on lexical availability and other objective and subjective variables.

The CLIL ‘Overspill’: Addressing Motivational Issues and Diversity in the EFL Classroom

Despite the ever-growing body of sturdy empirical research evidence highlighting the link between increased motivation and improved learning outcomes in CLIL contexts, there now seems to be a need to explore the multi-layered nature of learners’ motivational profiles, along with a range of intervening individual and contextual variables, in order to maximise learning potential for all types of learners. This has become more evident in our local university context which is characterised by notable diversity in the EFL and EMI classes offered by the Faculty of Philology at the ULPGC in terms of entry-level proficiency and motivational types. We shall attempt to address this supplementary need for further exploring the drive to learn English as a Foreign Language (EFL) based on Dörnyei’s (2009) ‘Motivational Self System’ (MSS), factoring in the individual variables of motivational type, previous experience (CLIL and non-CLIL backgrounds) or overseas experience and learner expectations, along with contextual variables such as teaching methodology, as a means to explore the diversity of our learners’ motivation and its relationship with heightened learning success, particularly in terms of lexical availability.