International platform for Brentwood School teacher’s cutting-edge research

Congratulations to Brentwood School teacher of Chinese, Kai Richter, who has been selected to speak at the Institute for Multilingualism’s 8th Spring Research Conference which will be held in Spain’s UIC Barcelona.

Mr Richter, who was chosen from a large pool of applicants, will give a 30-minute presentation at the prestigious research event based on the dissertation he produced for his MSc at the University of Oxford under supervisor Professor Victoria Murphy. His will be one of several presentations on cutting-edge research in the field of multilingual education.

In his dissertation, Mr Richter conducted a systematic review into content and language integrated learning (CLIIL) in multilingual schools. He explained: “A systematic review is similar to a literature review, or a broad paper that reviews a field of research and gives summaries about findings for a specific issue or topic.

“However, a systematic review is different in that it attempts to eliminate the author's bias as to what research is most important or relevant. Instead, for a systematic review, the author needs to define carefully what kind of research they are looking for and importantly, how and where they will search for it.

“CLIL is a form of education where content knowledge is taught through a foreign language. An example of CLIL could be students in Germany who study science in English or students in Wales who learn geography in Welsh. CLIL, sometimes called immersion, has been shown to be very successful in bilingual schools. However, less research has been done to look at schools where students have CLIL in more than two languages. For instance, schools in Hong Kong often teach in Cantonese, English, and Mandarin, and some schools in Spain teach in Spanish, English, and Catalan, Basque, or Galician.

“My dissertation aimed to find research about the effectiveness of CLIL forms of education in these multilingual schools where more than two languages are used to teach other core subjects. In my presentation I will be discussing the results and the implications of these findings.”

The key objective of the Spring Research Conference, which is an annual event, is to give a platform for researchers, like Mr Richter, to exchange research updates on topics related to teaching, learning and acquisition of languages and multilingual education. We wish him the best of luck.