Abstract
This paper sets out to place the research on Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) within the border of Chinese academia. In considering the limited amount of empirical research in China, the author problematises the construction of a shared CLIL research agenda aimed at extending the scope of the current academic scenario. A conceptual model is formulated based on the constructive proposal brought forward by Coyle et al. (2010) that CLIL research should involve the examination and understanding of performance evidence, affective evidence, process evidence and materials and task evidence. Given that almost all the reviewed CLIL studies were conducted in the scope of English language education in higher education, this model is positioned within a broad multilingual and educationally diverse context in China. A more comprehensive, rich and evidence-based research scenario is expected from Chinese researchers whose work is not only to extend the CLIL research agenda but also to probe into it in the long way ahead.
Highlights
1 The concept of teaching subject knowledge via a foreign language can be dated back to 5,000 years ago when the Akkadian conquerors started to learn Sumerian languages in order to settle into the local society (Mehisto et al, 2008), while it was until the 1990s that the notion of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) was proposed in Europe by David Marsh under the influence of the European Union’s multilingual contexts and language policies as well as the success of bilingual education programmes in other multilingual countries (Hanesová, 2015)
With the massive upsurge of CLIL research especially in the western world, Pérez Cañado (2018) has identified four key evolving moments in the CLIL arena, namely craze, critique, conundrum and controversy. She maintains that the initial stage of CLIL craze wherein the bloom of research studies, though a majority of which are assumed to be problematic in research designs, has heaped praise on the functioning of CLIL and generally ended and transitioned to the one of critique in which a pessimistic view is held toward CLIL based on unsubstantial assumptions and personal experience characterised by a lack of academic rigour and robustness (Pérez Cañado, 2020)
CLIL is not a young field of discipline but is still much alive and energetic as an innovative and practical pedagogical approach, the potential of which awaits to be unlocked in China with a more sophisticated understanding to be gained from future research
Summary
With the massive upsurge of CLIL research especially in the western world, Pérez Cañado (2018) has identified four key evolving moments in the CLIL arena, namely craze, critique, conundrum and controversy. In her latest publication, she maintains that the initial stage of CLIL craze wherein the bloom of research studies, though a majority of which are assumed to be problematic in research designs, has heaped praise on the functioning of CLIL and generally ended and transitioned to the one of critique in which a pessimistic view is held toward CLIL based on unsubstantial assumptions and personal experience characterised by a lack of academic rigour and robustness (Pérez Cañado, 2020). The introduction of CLIL into Asian countries (Tsagkari, 2019) as well as China (Luo, 2006) has already started in the early twenty-first century, this pedagogical approach is still a relatively new issue to be explored given that it is a seldom
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