Insider Views of the CLIL Class Through Teacher Self-observation– Introspection

The article aims to highlight some of the issues that are appearing in full force now that the CLIL option is being taken more and more into consideration by schools and educational authorities in may countries throughout Europe. The reasons for the considerable increase in interest in CLIL-based learning are various and can be found most importantly in the support given to this learning environment by European institutions such as the European Commission and the Council of Europe and the numerous European projects that have been financed by them in order to explore the different issues brought into play by CLIL. Just as the introduction of new information technologies (IT) into the educational sphere has given rise to a necessary reconsideration of the learning and teaching processes and procedures involved, so CLIL must just as much require a reconsideration of the learning and teaching processes and procedures involved, as CLIL, just as IT, constitutes a new learning and teaching environment. There is a danger however that the full impact of CLIL be not realised or be underestimated, the question being merely seen as one of change of language medium. A major area, we believe, for investigation in CLIL is the methodological didactic focus that the acronym itself calls to mind – namely the requirement that the foreign language be learnt through school subject content and that the school subject content be taught and learnt through the foreign language. Solutions therefore have to be found to guarantee this requirement and necessarily concern the way the CLIL lesson is managed. The main thrust of attention here therefore is on some of the methodological issues brought into play by the CLIL environment. In particular they will concern aspects such as: activities for learning; focus on the L2 and on the school subject; content and materials; learner difficulties and teacher strategy solutions. To this end the article will discuss the findings of research conducted over a three-year time span with a group of secondary school teachers (foreign language and non-language subjects) who enrolled on a post graduate training programme as part of a two-year training and action-research project in CLIL in 2002-2004. There was a follow-up investigation with some of the same teachers in 2005 and 2006. The group comprised 33 teachers enrolled as couples and chosen through a stiff selection procedure. They were experts in their subjects and highly motivated. All the teachers were new to CLIL. The data collected focussed for the most on the methodological didactic aspects of the CLIL lesson that allow us to see the way the students are engaged in the content learning in CLIL: activities, classroom organisation, language switch, learner difficulties. The results appear to demonstrate that CLIL effects the way the students learn the content because of the added extra cognitive burden represented by the presence of the L2; it affects the way (positive) the students learn the content because of the greater care the teachers seem to take to help their students to overcome the hurdles; it affects the way they learn the content (positive) because care is taken to nurture language growth through the content and the L1 is used as an instrument if needed to overcome learning difficulties.