With a strong tradition in Europe and in Australia, content and language integrated learning (CLIL) is a promising pedagogical approach for further developing a critical bilingual language awareness (Aufgeklärte Zweisprachigkeit, e.g. Fandrych 2010) in tertiary education in New Zealand. Teaching academic content using the target language – in this case German – is expected to foster both the learning of academic content, and the development of the target language proficiency. Within the context of a University German program, however, the simple adoption of CLIL programs from high schools that have been successful elsewhere does not guarantee the same positive outcomes.This presentation reports on selected results of the implementation of the CLIL approach for German (applied) linguistics courses at a New Zealand University – a novelty in this context, which is typically English dominated in teaching philological contents. The study focuses on a bilingual content course in German language teaching and learning pedagogy during the third year of German studies (B1-2 level). As part of their course assignments students were asked to write six reading journals (approx. 500 words each) throughout the course to summarize academic texts and reflect on their reception of these in the target language. These texts constituted the compulsory readings for the course. The reflections and elaborations on these texts were supposed to be made from a content and a language learning perspective in order to promote the students' understanding of academic texts in German for the first time in their academic career as well as raise awareness of their ongoing (academic) language learning development. By comparing examples from these journals in the trajectory of one semester it is shown how the students develop their writing and bilingual language awareness skills by producing this text type.
