I'm currently half-way through a session on CLIL, Content and Languages through Integrated Learning (or CBI: Content Based Instruction) where students learn maths, geography, physics, music or whatever through the medium of a foreign language. We had a presentation to start with which threw up too many questions without answers, considering the limited time we had as a group to discuss them all (even more limited with the simultaneous interpreting from French to Polish to English and back).
However, there were some good points from some exciting projects around Europe that I jotted down:
The first point I am not sure about is the definition of CLIL: Integrating content with foreign language, where the content is the commanding curriculum. How can students access the curriculum without an adequate command of the foreign language? A particpant from Slovakia picked up on this. She was responsible for a project where Czech, Slovak, Polish and Hungarians worked together and learned together in an International School, studying in English. She pointed out that we really have to teach language first to be able to work in a content area. This has to come first. Do they have the language of comparison, superlative, analysis and can they write an essay? I would say that the problem with this is that we already do this and the process can take until the end of a university career to get it done to a satisfactory standard.
CLIL has obvious upsides, most of which were evident in the projects represented at the conference. negotiation of meaning, conversational interactions for understanding
Comprehensible input from the teacher, Concentration on “form”, zone of proximal development is reached and more learning occurs. My pet favourite, cooperative learning and individual independent learning can be achieved together, although the speaker ran over the use of ICT far too quickly for my liking: ICT, as a colleague from France pointed out, is the key to making this dual approach to learning possible.
ICT is Key for Comprehensive Learning Approaches
He's a business teacher who ran the WKTO project: 100 virtual classrooms where participants are all from different countries and who hold no common language other than the one(s) they are learning. Brilliant. Language learning is successful because it has an actual use: you can't communicate without it at all, and English use is pointless because no-one in your classroom speaks it.
Individuals still making the difference, but the sum of the parts is not making the whole
There are many challenges to getting CLIL to become a norm that can be applied in any school. Above all is funding. Most subject teachers do not have the foreign language skills necessary to teach that subject in French, German, Spanish, Urdu, Italian, Gaelic even...
Where we miss teachers we make use of bright pupils to help the less linguistically able. Proficient peers help others (but what of their zone of proximal development?).
CLIL is not something I have great knowledge of, but I am seeing so many connections with the able pupils action research. There is something in common here, and quite what I am about to find out in the second half of the debate.
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