This book provides a unique longitudinal account of content and language integrated learning (CLIL). Giving voice to both learners and teachers, it offers insights into language learning outcomes, learner motivation among CLIL and non-CLIL students, effects of extramural exposure to English, issues in relation to assessment in CLIL and much more.

This book offers new empirical insights into the current state of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) characterisation (through an innovative proposal to link CLIL to English as a Lingua Franca), implementation (via observation protocols and SWOT analyses), and research (by examining the effects of CLIL on the L1, foreign language, key competences, and content subjects taught through English). The book provides a state of the art of the CLIL arena, identifies the chief challenges that need to be addressed and signposts possible ways of overcoming these in order to continue advancing smoothly into the next decade of CLIL development. This book will be of interest to researchers, policy-makers, educational authorities, and practitioners as it will assist them in making informed decisions about how to characterise, implement, and investigate CLIL in the bi- and plurilingual programs that are more frequently introduced in monolingual contexts.

This book provides a rich and unique longitudinal account of content and language integrated learning (CLIL). The chapters report on the findings from a large-scale, three-year research project undertaken at senior high school level in Sweden. The ecological perspective, with quantitative and qualitative methods, gives voice to both learners and teachers, as well as being an excellent critical example of how such longitudinal research might be carried out. Through emic and etic approaches, the book provides insights into language learning outcomes, both with regard to the target language English and the majority language Swedish; learner motivation among CLIL and non-CLIL students; effects of extramural exposure to English; issues in relation to assessment in CLIL and much more. As a whole, the book offers an unprecedented overview of learner outcomes and detailed insights into the comparison of CLIL and non-CLIL education. While it is embedded in the Swedish context, the nature of this study means that it has strong implications on an international basis.

The label CLIL stands for classrooms where a foreign language (English) is used as a medium of instruction in content subjects. This book provides a first in-depth analysis of the kind of communicative abilities which are embodied in such CLIL classrooms. It examines teacher and student talk at secondary school level from different discourse-analytic angles, taking into account the interpersonal pragmatics of classroom discourse and how school subjects are talked into being during lessons. The analysis shows how CLIL classroom interaction is strongly shaped by its institutional context, which in turn conditions the ways in which students experience, use and learn the target language. The research presented here suggests that CLIL programmes require more explicit language learning goals in order to fully exploit their potential for furthering the learners’ appropriation of a foreign language as a medium of learning.

This book links the growing empirical knowledge about the full complexity of CLIL to the European educational and language policies. Its contributors present research findings from several European countries on learning processes and learner achievement in CLIL as well as conceptual analyses in the light of the current policies of mainstreaming CLIL.

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) refers to an educational context where a foreign language (in this case English) is used as a medium of instruction in content subjects. This book presents and analyses the changes which take place in a CLIL classroom in secondary education. This book will also serve to raise CLIL teachers’ awareness of certain changes which occur in the CLIL classroom, and will consequently help them understand the process of Content and Language Integrated Learning. The book is organised into two parts: theoretical and empirical. These parts consist of six chapters each. The first three chapters review the professional literature relevant to this study, while the other three chapters are devoted to the empirical study.

Interest in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), in Europe and beyond, has increased exponentially since it first appeared on the scene in Europe in the early 1990s. CLIL has grown to become a much-discussed topic of language education today, with the number of publications pertaining to the field continuing to increase. Researchers, teachers, teacher trainers, course planners and others involved in CLIL are constantly searching for new studies to help them understand how CLIL is evolving and how best it can be implemented. As the concept is now informing the pedagogical principles of different educational realities, research and reflection are now required to further understand its potential and implications, its inherent difficulties and possible applications. This volume was conceived with this idea in mind. The book primarily covers three macro areas: learning, teaching and training. It provides insight into the latest areas of research and reflection that are characterizing the CLIL field in the current decade. The wide range of topics covered reveal, for example, a shift in interest towards CLIL at the tertiary level, focusing on lecturer and student perceptions and problems.

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is a form of education that combines language and content learning objectives, a shared concern with other models of bilingual education. While CLIL research has often addressed learning outcomes, this volume focuses on how integration can be conceptualised and investigated. Using different theoretical and methodological approaches, ranging from socioconstructivist learning theories to systemic functional linguistics, the book explores three intersecting perspectives on integration concerning curriculum and pedagogic planning, participant perceptions and classroom practices. The ensuing multidimensionality highlights that in the inherent connectedness of content and language, various institutional, pedagogical and personal aspects of integration also need to be considered.

Although Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is a popular teaching method, research on CLIL has nearly exclusively focused on aspects of language learning. Besides that, we are still lacking any cognitively well-grounded theory about the special features of contexts in which the focus is on content learning, but in which a foreign language is used as the medium of communicating information. This book re-examines the basis for CLIL from a cognitive perspective and investigates how the use of a foreign language as a working language influences the processing of content. It summarizes findings from cognitive psychology on thinking, problem solving and conceptual processing, and integrates them with models of language-specific mental activities such as speech processing and text composition. This provides a theoretically well-grounded basis for the understanding of the special features of CLIL, and promotes a Cognitive Linguistic perspective on CLIL pedagogy. The theoretical considerations form the basis for an empirical study that offers the first insights into what CLIL learners actually do when they solve content-focused tasks while using an L2. Through spontaneous verbalization of thought, detailed verbal protocols were elicited and analysed into language and content focused cognitive processes. The analysis shows that both language and conceptual thought interact closely and that a focus on language in general has positive effects on the processing of semantic content; the use of an L2 as working language can enhance this effect. Additionally, the study offers a thorough reflection and new perspectives on verbal protocols as research tools, in particular in L2 contexts.

This book contributes to the growth of interest in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), an approach to second/foreign language learning that requires the use of the target language to learn content. Within the framework of European strategies to promote multilingualism, CLIL has begun to be used extensively in a variety of language learning contexts, and at different educational systems and language programmes. This book brings together critical analyses on theoretical and implementation issues of Content and Language Integrated Learning, and empirical studies on the effectiveness of this type of instruction on learners’ language competence. The basic theoretical assumption behind this book is that through successful use of the language to learn content, learners will develop their language proficiency more effectively while they learn the academic content specified in the curricula.