How are students engaged in subject learning through the LS? Activities for learning in a CLIL environment.

The present article deals with an issue connected with the need to understand the Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) environment and the quality of the learning that takes place in it. The main focus is the construct ‘task’, namely, what the student is asked to do on the input (verbal/non-verbal) he is given. The CLIL environment is new both for the student and for the teacher and as such poses significant problems for learning (of both content and language contemporaneously) and for the teaching strategies that must promote the learning. An important area of investigation concerns the type and quantity of the learning activities the teacher proposes in the CLIL lessons to promote content and language learning. Much is underway in the area of learning activities: in the field of foreign/second language learning through the developments in task-based methodology and in the field of task-based research with the work on task types and task structure and their relation to language competence development and the part played by accuracy, fluency and complexity. In order to conduct the investigation, twenty-five randomly-chosen CLIL teaching modules written by teachers attending a post-graduate CLIL course were examined. The teaching modules contained teacher and student files on a range of school subjects for the middle and high school. The aim was to see the kinds of tasks proposed and gauge their potential efficacy for the promotion of dual learning: content and language. In order to collect the data, a framework of analysis comprising 5 categories was devised to ‘photograph’ important features of a task and its potential for CLIL learning. The final result is qualitative in focus even though based on numerical data.