Cartas de aula: CLIL: A Lesson Plan

CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) is a word applied to classrooms where a foreign language (here in Spain mostly English) is used as a medium of instruction in content subjects. The term was launched during 1994 in conjunction with the European Commission and the official definition EuroCLIL provided was: "CLIL is a dual-focused educational approach in which an additional language is used for the learning and teaching of both content and language" (source: The CLIL Guidebook).

According to that same Guidebook, CLIL involves a change of focus in the classroom. It's about showing students to find out information for themselves, how to work and talk together to discover new ideas so that using the language becomes part of the process of learning. By doing this, the teacher prepares students for the modern world, where people work in project teams; use other languages to talk to various colleagues and to communicate with people in different countries. They are expected to solve problems, plan their own work and find out things for themselves using a range of sources, especially the Internet.

Source: The CLIL Guidebook

CLIL involves the development of social, cultural, cognitive, linguistic, academic and other learning skills, which in turn facilitate achievements in both content and language. In this regard, The CLIL Guidebook recommends thinking of Bloom's taxonomy in terms of Learning Behaviours:

We have to remember a concept before we can understand it
We have to understand a concept before we can apply it
We have to be able to apply a concept before we can analyze it
We have to analyze a concept before we can evaluate it
We have to remember, understand, apply, analyze, and evaluate a concept before we can create

Source: The CLIL Guidebook

Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) and scaffolding are crucial in CLIL, since during this stage of learning, the student can be helped to progress to complete and independent proficiency by support from someone with a higher level of knowledge or skill. That temporary support is described by the metaphor of "scaffolding", a platform from which learners can construct the next level of understanding and knowledge.

The core of CLIL lies in integration, but rather than simply a matter of combining content and language to support FL language development, integration is a multi-dimensional and highly complex phenomenon (Nikula1 et al., 2016). Over the years, projects have been carried out in several countries and at different levels of educations. They now involve technology, materials design and the creation of CLIL networks and resources.

However, CLIL classroom interaction continues to be strongly shaped by its institutional context which also conditions the ways in which teachers and students experience, use and learn the target language. In fact, recent papers such as this one delve into that matter.

I recently had the chance to attend a course taught by Robin Walker where we reviewed the basics of CLIL methodology, from considerations that were more theoretical in nature to moments of reflection and more pragmatic matters such as lesson planning.

I am no CLIL expert, but because I was working during these sessions with someone who works in a Ciclo Formativo grado medio de Confección in Vigo, I thought I would share the materials I put together in a lesson plan in case they might be useful to anyone else.

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1 Nikula, T., E. Dafouz, P. Moore, and U. Smit. 2016. Conceptualising Integration in CLIL and Multilingual Education. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

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