Gary Anderson, Cambridge’s Senior International Teacher Trainer, shares an introduction to CLIL drawn from his recent conference talk on Content and Language Integrated Learning.
Last month, I attended the annual Association of English Teachers in the Czech Republic (AETCR) national conference. More than 100 teachers from around the Czech Republic and the nearby countries of Slovakia, Serbia and Croatia came to Tomáš Bata University in Uherské Hradiště, in the Moravian region of the Czech Republic. I’d been asked to give a plenary on Content and Language Integrated Learning: CLIL, to answer the question…
What is CLIL?
With the AETCR audience I used a definition I like from CLIL: Content and Language Integrated Learning: ‘Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is a dual-focused educational approach in which an additional language is used for the learning and teaching of both content and language. That is, in the teaching and learning process, there is a focus not only on content, and not only on language. Each is interwoven even if the emphasis is greater on one or the other at a given time.‘ The key word there is ‘interwoven’; it’s just like the picture below…
Why CLIL?
Well, as David Graddol noted in his study English Next for the British Council back in 2006: ‘A steady state will be reached where the majority of learners are either young and/or in need of specialist support.‘ He uses the analogy of the ‘language escalator’ in talks: In the past, students typically started learning a foreign language as adolescents and so when they got near the top of the escalator, then maybe they were ready for ESP or EAP. Whereas now, in more and more countries, pupils start learning a language as young learners in primary school, so by the time they reach even the middle of the ‘language escalator’ their English can be quite good and they can be ready for CLIL, or ‘ESP for Kids’ as I call it.
There’s another reason of course: that learners have different interests! Not all your students are interested in languages or are going to become future English teachers (although hopefully some will). But they might be interested in geography, history, science, maths etc. As an English teacher, you of course are not expected to know a lot about those other subjects. But what if you bring into the language lessons some matter and materials from other subjects in the school curriculum using the target language? Do that, and you’re reaching out to all the learners, even the non-verbal/linguistic ones.
III. How to CLIL?
1) Well, what we’ve been discussing above is ‘soft CLIL’, or what I call ‘CLIL lite’, in which some curricular topics are taught in the language class. Most primary and secondary coursebooks now include CLIL pages and activities. At the conference in the Czech Republic, we looked at examples from Super Minds for primary pupils and from Eyes Open for secondary students and we also talked about using the Cambridge Young Readers Factbooks for young learners and Cambridge Discovery Readers for older students as a ‘soft’ or ‘lite’ means of working subject matter into learning English via extensive reading.
2) There is also ‘hard CLIL’, which I call ‘real CLIL’: subject-led, with content from the subject curriculum taught in the target language. At the AETCR conference, we looked especially at how language teachers can help their colleagues teaching a subject in a foreign language to adapt materials. We looked at practical examples from CLIL Activities: A Resource for subject and language teachers which includes ‘Tips for cross-curricular cooperation between subject and language teachers’ on predicting, eliciting, scaffolding, using information gap activities, etc.—techniques that we as language teachers use, but that subject teachers might not.
3) And there is of course a middle road, i.e. ‘modular CLIL’, in which schools or teachers choose part of the subject syllabus to teach in the target language. This can probably most easily and interestingly be done as individual or group project work; the assessment can then be done by both the English teacher for the language and the subject teacher for the content.
Discover more of Gary Anderson Trips and Tips; for more CLIL advice and activities, try Aiming high with CLIL.