CLIL Methodology: Integrating Language and Content

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL)

Culture

Content-Culture

Ensures there isn’t a black hole in the learning environment. Achieved through appropriate target language input, such as:

• Authentic materials
• Documents
• First language materials

This allows learners to compare different cultural perspectives on a specific topic.

Language-Culture

Allows the learner to acquire and use a broad range of registers in the target language. The cultural background is responsible for these developments. CLIL is also more common in plurilingual countries where other languages are chosen as the target language. The choice of language and location is always culturally relevant.

Integration-Culture

Integrating the learning of language and content needs to be culturally relevant.

Learning-Culture

Studying a topic through alternative perspectives allows for self-reflection and reflection on others. These opportunities need to be analyzed and integrated into the curriculum through documents, pictures, and photos, especially for the humanities and social sciences.

Community

Content-Community

The community includes the school, parents, and other stakeholders. A CLIL class should be embedded in a positive and supportive community. A CLIL school should be open to other countries, with exchange programs. The town should create encounters with inhabitants of a twin city.

Language-Community

Language learning rarely takes place only in the classroom. The school and other external stakeholders support the learner’s language development. Schools are very active in establishing contact with schools in target language countries.

Integration-Community

The value of doing CLIL needs to be recognized by the community around the school to ensure long-term development and sustainability. The CLIL school ensures that these values are clear and transparent. CLIL schools should be proactive in establishing relations with their surroundings through project days and theater.

Learning-Community

CLIL depends on a positive learning environment within the class, the school, and the wider community. School support is of the utmost importance for CLIL to be successful. If other teachers do not fully support CLIL, it can be difficult to achieve best practices.

Communication

Content-Communication

Interactive learning, group work, and pair work, as opposed to mainly teacher talk. The teacher alone cannot provide learners with all they need to know to learn language and content, but they can structure the class to achieve success. For example, in a history class, working in groups with documents allows learners to progress faster in content and language learning. As they have to transmit the results, they use the foreign language and thus develop more academic communicative competence.

Learning-Communication

In the class, communication needs to actively support both language and content learning. This requires a wide variety of communication skills to be used by teachers and students alike.

Integration-Communication

Diverse types of communication when learning content are typical features of a CLIL class. The teacher needs to ensure that the methods used enable such communication to take place through content learning. There are two types of communication: transactional (teacher-centered) and interactional.

Language-Communication

A quality CLIL class will typically include learner-learner-teacher communication which is socially oriented. The teacher’s communication should ensure maximum richness of language while adapting to the learner’s level. Learner-learner-teacher communication should be in the target language as much as possible. This might sometimes be demanding when dealing with complex topics in the content subject. Teachers must try to adapt their language to the learner’s level. First language interaction should only be the last possible solution.