English Language Teaching Goes CLIL

Abstract

In recent decades, content and language integrated learning (CLIL) has become a widespread pedagogic innovation in schools all over Europe and in Spain particularly. By virtue of this approach, a foreign language, very frequently English, becomes the language of instruction of one or several curricular subjects, thereby increasing students’ exposure to the language, thus hopefully helping them to reach higher levels of proficiency. However, learning in a foreign language requires more than just changing the language of instruction, making it necessary to develop new approaches to teaching to make sure knowledge construction is as effective as in the mother tongue and students are provided the necessary linguistic scaffolding to guarantee their language development. While this need for methodological change has been acknowledged for teaching the content subjects, it has not equally been recognised for teaching the foreign language itself, thus creating a situation in which the changed needs and possibilities of students in relation to the foreign language are recognised in content-subject teaching but much less so in foreign language teaching. In the Spanish context, and more specifically in the autonomous community of Madrid, a first attempt to adapt foreign language teaching to the nature of CLIL was made by creating what is known as the Advanced English curriculum, where, alongside traditional language lessons, often centred around grammar, students are required to read, and learn about, literature of the English-speaking world. After a seven-year experience of implementing this curriculum, with many English teachers criticising it for its lack of coherence and meaningfulness and many content teachers complaining about its limited relevance to the actual needs of students, the educational authorities decided to completely change the approach to teaching English in secondary schools, implementing a CLIL approach. The rationale behind this new curriculum was twofold: on the one hand, the English lessons should contribute to help students meet the challenges of learning new content through a foreign language by developing the necessary literacy skills, academic abilities and learning strategies. On the other, the English language curriculum should maintain its focus on cultural aspects of the language approached by means of its literature. This chapter describes the process followed to create this new curriculum and how it was designed to meet the changed needs of learners in the context of CLIL programs.