1 Rationale for CLIL approach 1 What is CLIL? CLIL models ...
CLIL . . . not only not immersion but
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readers respond CLIL ... not only not immersion but also more than the sum of its parts Y.L.Teresa Ting For one who has been navigating in uncertain CLIL (content and language integrated learning) waters for almost a decade, it was a great pleasure to read Lasagabaster and Sierra’s (2010) article in ELT Journal which clearly states that ‘CLIL is not immersion’. I could not agree more. Not only is CLIL not immersion, here, I would like to discuss how CLIL has the potential to significantly renovate both content education and language instruction through what I call a ‘Core CLIL Construct’: a way of reasoning. In turn, this Construct provides classroom teachers with three concrete ‘CLIL Operands’: ways of proceeding. I would like to draw the attention of the EFL community to how science educators are using these same ‘CLIL notions’ to significantly improve science education. Since EFL practitioners are in a prime position to contribute to this effort to renovate twenty-first century education through CLIL, I list two reasons why the EFL community should take note of CLIL. With a PhD in neuroscience and almost 15 years researching rats’ brains, I was offered the biochemist’s dream job of teaching ‘Science in English’ to Italian high school students’ brains with the instruction ‘use CLIL ’. Without concrete guidelines and being of a positivistic mindset, I interpreted the acronym mathematically and began implementing CLIL science learning contexts through a 50:50/content:language ratio (Ting 2010) which ‘attends to both language and content’ as per Marsh (2005). If we look at only the language component of this ratio, we have what I feel is a central ‘way of reasoning’—the Core CLIL Construct—which lies in the question, ‘Whose language?’ This core Construct thus focuses our attention on the process of learning and not the act of teaching: CLIL obviously attends to how the learner—not the teacher —is acquiring, using, and mastering the foreign language (FL). In turn, this Construct automatically provides teachers three very concrete ‘ways of proceeding’: three CLIL Operands. The first two come from the fact that we have chosen to use an FL for content education: first of all, as learners must acquire content knowledge through an FL for which they have limited linguistic resources, the CLIL teacher must naturally consider if the language of instruction is comprehensible. CLIL Operand 1 thus asks ‘Do learners understand the language that I, the teacher, or the book is using?’ Secondly, if the purpose of using an FL is so learners can master it, we must cultivate not only the receptive skills of reading and listening but also learners’ productive skills of speaking and writing. CLIL ELT Journal; doi:10.1093/elt/ccr026 1 of 4 ª The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. ELT Journal Advance Access published May 2, 2011 by guest on May 3, 2011 eltj.oxfordjournals.org Downloaded from
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For one who has been navigating in uncertain CLIL (content and languageintegrated learning) waters for almost a decade, it was a great pleasure toread Lasagabaster and Sierra’s (2010) article in ELT Journal which clearlystates that ‘CLIL is not immersion’. I could not agreemore.Not only is CLILnot immersion, here, I would like to discuss how CLIL has the potential tosignificantly renovate both content education and language instructionthrough what I call a ‘CoreCLILConstruct’: a way of reasoning. In turn, thisConstruct provides classroom teachers with three concrete ‘CLILOperands’: ways of proceeding. I would like to draw the attention of the EFLcommunity to howscience educators are using these same‘CLIL notions’ tosignificantly improve science education. Since EFL practitioners are ina prime position to contribute to this effort to renovate twenty-first centuryeducation through CLIL, I list two reasons why the EFL community shouldtake note of CLIL.
Transcript of CLIL . . . not only not immersion but
readers respond
CLIL . . . not only not immersion butalso more than the sum of its parts
Y.L.Teresa Ting
For one who has been navigating in uncertain CLIL (content and languageintegrated learning) waters for almost a decade, it was a great pleasure toread Lasagabaster and Sierra’s (2010) article in ELT Journal which clearlystates that ‘CLIL is not immersion’. I could not agree more. Not only is CLIL
not immersion, here, I would like to discuss how CLIL has the potential tosignificantly renovate both content education and language instructionthrough what I call a ‘Core CLIL Construct’: a way of reasoning. In turn, thisConstruct provides classroom teachers with three concrete ‘CLIL
Operands’: ways of proceeding. I would like to draw the attention of the EFL
community to how science educators are using these same ‘CLIL notions’ tosignificantly improve science education. Since EFL practitioners are ina prime position to contribute to this effort to renovate twenty-first centuryeducation through CLIL, I list two reasons why the EFL community shouldtake note of CLIL.
With a PhD in neuroscience and almost 15 years researching rats’ brains, Iwas offered the biochemist’s dream job of teaching ‘Science in English’ toItalian high school students’ brains with the instruction ‘use CLIL’. Withoutconcrete guidelines and being of a positivistic mindset, I interpreted theacronym mathematically and began implementing CLIL science learningcontexts through a 50:50/content:language ratio (Ting 2010) which ‘attendsto both language and content’ as per Marsh (2005). If we look at only thelanguage component of this ratio, we have what I feel is a central ‘way ofreasoning’—the Core CLIL Construct—which lies in the question, ‘Whoselanguage?’ This core Construct thus focuses our attention on the process oflearning and not the act of teaching: CLIL obviously attends to how thelearner—not the teacher —is acquiring, using, and mastering the foreignlanguage (FL). In turn, this Construct automatically provides teachers threevery concrete ‘ways of proceeding’: three CLIL Operands. The first two comefrom the fact that we have chosen to use an FL for content education: first ofall, as learners must acquire content knowledge through an FL for whichthey have limited linguistic resources, the CLIL teacher must naturallyconsider if the language of instruction is comprehensible. CLIL Operand 1thus asks ‘Do learners understand the language that I, the teacher, or thebook is using?’ Secondly, if the purpose of using an FL is so learners canmaster it, we must cultivate not only the receptive skills of reading andlistening but also learners’ productive skills of speaking and writing. CLIL
ELT Journal; doi:10.1093/elt/ccr026 1 of 4ªª The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.
ELT Journal Advance Access published May 2, 2011 by guest on M
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Operand 2 thus asks ‘Can learners use language effectively to ‘‘obtaininformation’’, ‘‘negotiate understanding’’, ‘‘discuss hypotheses’’, and‘‘convey knowledge’’?’
Therefore, no matter how perfect the teacher’s English, a teacher blabbingabout physics in English is not CLIL because CLIL attends to the learners’ability to use language. CLIL thus shifts classroom dynamics away fromteacher-centred lecturing to learner-centred learning. This alone is reasonfor any education community to notice CLIL. But there is much more.Although the two aforementioned Operands regard language instruction,these catalyze an important change in content education. When a teacherrealizes that the input language must be comprehensible, it comes naturallyto also consider whether the input content is comprehensible. CLIL
Operand 3 thus asks ‘Is the content presented in chewable and digestiblealiquots?’ The flowchart in Figure 1 illustrates how the Core CLIL Constructcoordinates the three CLIL Operands.
CLIL thus implements language-aware instruction which naturally leads tocontent-aware education. Interestingly, that language-aware instructionpositively supports content-aware education was the focus of Science(volume 328, April 2010) in which science educators extensively citedHalliday and Martin’s (1993) landmark volumeWriting Science, recognizingthat the language of science is ‘alienating’, if not downright annoying. Infact, when our teachers adopted that concise and authoritative tone toexplain strange-sounding phenomena which our young minds couldneither see nor fathom, they transformed our mother tongue into a foreignlanguage (Snow 2010)! Well, imagine learning science in an FL: thechallenges of an immersion-like curriculum without the advantages ofimmersion-like extra-curricularity! No need to imagine: Webb (2010)reported that when ex-anglophone colonies in Africa used English, an ‘elitistFL’, to teach science, dismal results were obtained. However, the situationwas redeemed when science educators realized that, since the language ofinstruction was an FL, they had to ensure that the language of instructionwas comprehensible: CLIL Operand 1. The notion ‘speak so learnersunderstand’ is obvious for EFL practitioners who are naturally language-aware instructors, whether the topic is The Beatles or antioxidants. This isthe first reason the EFL community should take note of CLIL: EFL expertise,probably more than that in any other arena of education, is naturallypositioned for developing language-aware content education.
Not surprisingly, as the African science educators became increasinglymore language aware, they basically came to CLIL Operand 2: ‘What are thelearners able to do with the language?’ Although the sine qua non of EFL
instruction, this question prompted science educators to implement morestudent-led ‘hands-on’ experimentations, transforming teacher-centredlecturing into learner-centred learning which automatically increasesopportunities for learners to ‘language’ their learning. To their credit, thesescience educators took language-aware instruction even further to cultivatelearners’ ability to ‘language scientifically’ i.e. write and speak logically,coherently, precisely, and objectively. They realized that the processes ofspeaking and writing are necessary for transforming ‘hands-on’ learninginto ‘minds-on’ understanding (Webb op.cit.). Ever since Cummins (1981)
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entered ‘BICS’ (basic interpersonal communication skills) and ‘CALP’(cognitive academic language proficiency) into our professional lexicon 30years ago, EFL practitioners have developed methods to engage learners inthe deep-level cognitive processes needed for transforming informalclassroom discussions into formal academic reports. In fact, regardless ofthe subject matter or whether it is our L1 or an FL, attending to how learnersare ‘languaging understanding’ automatically puts ‘literacy’ on the learning
figure 1
Coordination of the threeCLIL Operands by theCore CLIL Construct
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agenda (Swain 2006; Pearson, Moje, and Greenleaf 2010). The fact that EFL
expertise ‘languages’ comfortably between BICS and CALP is the secondreason the EFL community should take note of CLIL.
Therefore, although prompted by different reasons for merging scienceeducation with FL instruction, science educators in ex-anglophone coloniesin Africa and CLIL practitioners in Europe have none the less reached thesimilar realization that content education can benefit greatly from language-aware instruction. And EFL practitioners are in a prime position tocontribute. Given content-learning objectives defined by content experts,EFL practitioners have the necessary expertise for designing ad hoc CLIL
learning contexts which are not only learner centred, content driven, andliteracy directed but also fall within the comfort zones of both EFL andcontent teachers. Considering that most of the world does not haveimmersion-like possibilities, CLIL is not only ‘not immersion’(Lasagabaster and Sierra op.cit.) but, done well and under the tutorage of theEFL community, is revealing itself to be much more than the sum of itsparts.
Final revised version received January 2011
ReferencesCummins, J. 1981. ‘Age on arrival and immigrantsecond language learning in Canada: areassessment’. Applied Linguistics 11/2: 132–49.Halliday, M. A. K. and J. R. Martin. 1993. WritingScience. London: Falmer Press.Lasagabaster, D. and J. M. Sierra. 2010. ‘Immersionand CLIL in English: more differences thansimiliarites’. ELT Journal 64/4: 367–75.Marsh, D. 2005. ‘Adding language without takingaway’. Guardian Weekly, 8 April. Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianweekly/story/0,12674,1464367,00.html (accessed on 20 February2011).Pearson, P. D., E. Moje, and C. Greenleaf. 2010.‘Literacy and science: each in the service of the other’.Science 328: 459–63.Snow, C. E. 2010. ‘Academic language and thechallenge of reading for learning about science’.Science 328: 450–2.Swain, M. 2006. ‘Languaging, agency andcollaboration in advanced second languageproficiency’ in H. Byrnes (ed.). Advanced Language
Learning: The Contribution of Halliday and Vygotsky.London: Continuum.Ting, Y. L. T. 2010. ‘CLIL appeals to how the brainlikes its information: examples from CLIL-
(Neuro)Science’. International CLIL Research Journal1/3: 1–18. Available at http://www.icrj.eu/13-73(accessed on 26 October 2010).Webb, P. 2010. ‘Science education and literacy:imperatives for the developed and developing world’.Science 328: 448–50.
The authorY.L. Teresa Ting divides her assistant professorshipbetween the Faculty of Sciences and the Departmentof Linguistics of the University of Calabria insouthern Italy. She is also the coordinator of theCLIL-ICLHE (Integrating Content and Learning inHigher Education) Division of the UniversityLanguage Centre. These responsibilities give her theopportunity to collaborate with both content andforeign language teachers at all levels of instructionin order to research and implement more effectivelearning environments for CLIL and ICLHE.Email: [email protected]
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