Integration in CLIL: a proposal to inform research and successful pedagogy

Abstract

Research on content and language integrated learning (CLIL) has expanded substantially in the last 10 years. While research interests have predominantly focused on language learning outcomes and the comparison between CLIL and English as a foreign language (EFL) students’ competence in the foreign language, recent studies have called for the need to focus on how language and content are best learnt in integration. In order to understand integration in its full scope, there are two main variables that need to be carefully investigated: the functions of language in different subjects (subject literacies and genres) and the way language and content interact in a variety of classroom interactional activities. This article presents a model for the understanding of integration in CLIL drawing on the combination of systemic-functional linguistic (SFL) and classroom interactional approaches to language and meaning construction. As shown in previous studies, CLIL teachers and learners need to be aware of the characteristics of different genres within their academic disciplines and the lexico-grammatical resources required to participate in those genres. CLIL learners are expected to use these linguistic resources in a second/foreign language to express academic knowledge (ideational function), but also to appraise that knowledge and participate socially in the classroom (interpersonal function), and to produce and distinguish between written and oral texts (textual function). However, the SFL model alone does not offer the complete picture of how content and language are learnt in integration. In addition to knowing what is integrated, it is equally necessary to understand how integration unfolds in the actual context of the classroom. For this second purpose, the study suggests a combination of SFL with other approaches that consider interaction as a key element in the learning process. This process can be studied by identifying students’ language and content engagement when they participate in different classroom activities.

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