Enhancing the quality of clil: making the best of the collaboration between language teachers and content teachers

Abstract

Success in CLIL depends on making students able to understand and express academic material. In theory, a high linguistic competence will enable students to smoothly deal with the content, although there might be occasions in which the students are not equipped with a solid command of the basic linguistic skills. The idea posited in this article is that, in parallel with other procedures and measures brought up to promote a correct employment of the language, the construction of a structure of collaboration between the language and the content teachers could contribute to attain positive results in CLIL, and may help mitigate the consequences of a possible linguistic deficit. In particular, the collaboration between the language and content teachers, the collaboration between the content teachers themselves, and the collaboration between all the languages present in the curriculum (mother tongue, language of instruction/foreign language, and any other languages) may result in a better ability to work with academic material on the part of the students, and may provide them with the necessary linguistic support to understand and express this content. We will discuss the theoretical foundations behind this proposal, and we will put forward a series of recommendations aiming at establishing and carrying out this structure of collaboration and coordination.

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