CLIL Teacher Education in Spain

Abstract

In a political context of international cooperation in education, one of the EU’s multilingualism goals is for every European to speak two languages in addition to their mother tongue (Commission of the European Communities, Teaching and Learning: Towards the Learning Society. White Paper on Education and Training. Brussels: ERIC Clearinghouse, 1995). In this context, Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has emerged as a major innovation for improving the quality of language learning and introducing a reform of educational curricula. Spain has become one of the European leaders in the development of bilingual and multilingual education policies based on CLIL (Coyle, Hood, & Marsh, CLIL—Content and Language Integrated Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). However, the rapid expansion of these Spanish bilingual and plurilingual programmes (Llinares & Dafouz, Content and language integrated programs in the Madrid region: Overview and research findings. In D. Lasagabaster & Y. Ruiz de Zarobe (Eds.), CLIL in Spain: Implementation, Results and Teacher Training (pp. 95–114). Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2010) has exceeded the provision of teachers who are able to face the challenge of CLIL. According to Perez-Canado (Teacher training needs for bilingual education: In-service teacher perceptions. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 19(3), 266–295. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2014.980778, 2016), overcoming this challenge is key to any future vision for the improvement of bilingual education. This chapter provides a detailed diagnosis of pre-service and in-service teacher training for CLIL in Spain and describes Spanish CLIL teachers’ needs with reference to their linguistic and methodological profile.