First steps in CLIL: Training the teachers

Susan Hillyard

doi:10.5294/laclil.2011.4.2.1

Abstract

As David Graddol’s “World English Project” gains momentum (Graddol, 2006), CLIL is increasingly being taken up by Ministries of Education as an innovative approach to teaching modern languages, as a motivating method for teaching subject areas, or simply as a contribution to internationalisation and the ideal of multilingualism. With this exponential growth, the lack of competent, trained CLIL teachers has become more evident. Content teachers are not infrequently monolingual and may not recognize the benefits of becoming bilingual, while language teachers may not feel proficient in the subject-area knowledge required for content teaching. Education ministries insist on CLIL implementation, but do not oversee a workforce sufficiently competent in all three necessary areas: target language ability, subject knowledge, and CLIL methodology. This paper explores the need to design quality training modules at ITT (Initial Teacher Training) colleges, for PGCSE (Postgraduate Certificate in Education) courses at universities, and INSET (In-Service Education and Training) courses so that teachers to feel confident in embarking on CLIL courses at primary, secondary, and tertiary levels.

Highlights

As long ago as the publication of the “Bullock Report” (Department of Education and Science, 1975) in England, I was interested in the connection between content and language
As I went on to live and work in a number of other countries—in Singapore, teaching teenagers in a trilingual school; in Saudi Arabia, as K-12 curriculum co-ordinator in a bilingual Muslim girls’ school; in Spain, as department head in an international school; and in Argentina as head of secondary in three bilingual schools, as director of a teachers’ centre that served the professional development needs of 100 bilingual schools, and as a professor at two training colleges in Buenos Aires—as an associate trainer of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) at NILE in UK, I began to see how neither language could be separated from content, nor content from language
As Pistorio (2007), exploring CLIL in Argentina, says, Given the importance of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) for bilingual institutions, Argentine universities and teaching training colleges need to incorporate this approach in their curricula to certify that graduate teachers are qualified to teach English as a foreign language (EFL) and content based subjects. (p. 1)

Summary

INTRODUCTION

As long ago as the publication of the “Bullock Report” (Department of Education and Science, 1975) in England, I was interested in the connection between content and language. A new orthodoxy appears to have taken root in the last few years which could be described as ‘The World English Project’ If this project succeeds, it could generate over two billion new speakers of English within a decade. As Pistorio (2007), exploring CLIL in Argentina, says, Given the importance of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) for bilingual institutions, Argentine universities and teaching training colleges need to incorporate this approach in their curricula to certify that graduate teachers are qualified to teach English as a foreign language (EFL) and content based subjects. CLIL teachers need three separate but intertwined abilities in order to operate within this new approach: target language ability, content knowledge, and CLIL methodology. CLIL methodology, especially in terms of output from students, the use of graphic organizers, Bloom’s taxonomy of thinking skills, Cummins’s BICS and CALP, the diversity of CLIL approaches (as expressed in Figure 1), and “learning as doing” in interaction

Methodology

Findings

CONCLUSION