CLIL students’ communicative functions across activities and educational levels

•Effect of activity type on CLIL students’ pragmatic performance assessed across educational levels.•More variety of communicative functions in group-work sessions at both primary and secondary levels.•Higher frequency of the regulatory function at primary and of the personal function at secondary in group-work sessions.

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has been shown to have positive effects on receptive skills, vocabulary or morphology; however, its effect on students’ pragmatic achievement has hardly been explored yet. Based on previous research carried out on children's functional development in the L1 (Halliday, 1975 and Painter, 1999) and on pre-school learners’ communicative functions performed in the L2 (Llinares, 2006, Llinares, 2007a, Llinares, 2007b and Llinares and Romero, 2007), the present study analyses primary and secondary school students’ performance of communicative functions in CLIL classrooms in two types of activities: whole-class and group-work discussions. Contrary to the findings reported in previous studies at pre-school level, the results of the analysis show that both primary and secondary school students perform a wider variety of functions in group-work than in whole-class discussions. However, there are interesting differences across educational levels regarding frequency of use of different functions, which can be identified as signals of pragmatic development.