Children with ADHD enrolled in content and language integrated learning (CLIL): Educational risk or opportunity?

The inclusiveness of immersion education, such as CLIL, for atypically developing pupils remains understudied. At the same time, immersion learning has been argued to impose high attentional and executive control demands. From this perspective, children already experiencing difficulties in these cognitive abilities, such as children with ADHD, might be at greater risk in immersion education. To address this issue empirically, 26 fifth and sixth-grade pupils with ADHD and 41 typically developing controls were recruited in CLIL and non-CLIL programs, and compared across attentional, executive, linguistic, and academic measures. Our findings do not support the claim that CLIL would only host the mildest forms of ADHD, nor that CLIL would pose additional cognitive and academic challenges for children with ADHD. On the contrary, we conclude that CLIL may offer a valuable opportunity for foreign-language learning, also for pupils with developmental disorders.