Recently, I had the pleasure of hearing through the form of a webinar entitled “Bilingual Excellence: A Practical Guide to CLIL Methodology” by Lesley Voss hosted by the Chartered Institute for Linguists. Lesley has been a language teacher, translator and interpreter for Italian and English at various schools and companies in Italy since 2008, having also specialised in German, Greek and Mandarin Chinese. She has been a language examiner since 2021 and trains hundreds of students for the Cambridge and Trinity exams using CLIL.
What is CLIL?
CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) is the idea that rather than focusing on teaching just a language to become truly bilingual, students should learn subjects such as mathematics, science, or history (or any subject really) in a language other than their native language. As a result, they improve both their knowledge about a subject and their language skills at the same time.
There are four main pillars of CLIL, called the 4 Cs:
Communication is the use of language to convey ideas, thoughts and opinions.
Content focuses on a subject or topic, allowing students to learn two things at once (the subject and the language).
Cognition is encouraged through critical thinking and problem-solving.
Culture is learnt through promoting awareness of how something is done in the target language/culture.
Benefits of CLIL and Bilingualism
The CLIL method has several advantages. Academically and cognitively, bilingual students generally are better at problem-solving and multitasking. They also have improved memory skills and are better at adapting to new information and situations (e.g., code-switching between languages). Research has also shown that CLIL promotes the formation of grey matter in bilingual brains. All of this leads to higher academic performance than their non-bilingual counterparts.
As students are learning to be bilingual through CLIL rather than focusing solely on the language, their personal, professional and social outcomes are also better on average. With a broader range of job prospects (either in terms of location/country or in terms of skills), greater ease with travelling or more developed intercultural communication skills, students who learn under CLIL tend to be more open-minded and better at adapting to diverse environments.
How does CLIL work?
Because CLIL students focus on topics other than language, several traditional barriers teachers and students encounter are overcome more easily with this system. Language students, rather than having issues with the language, often have confidence issues and so are hesitant to speak. They are usually too focused on not making mistakes, thereby guaranteeing overthinking and usually becoming paralysed in the process.
In contrast, the CLIL methodology promotes fluency over accuracy with its aim of being bilingual, meaning students gain confidence and are not as worried about making mistakes. Communication in CLIL classrooms is also practical in terms of the real world, is usually more interactive and enjoyable for students, and is an excellent way of providing progressive skill building using a scaffolded approach.
Types of CLIL
There are two main types of CLIL: hard and soft. Hard CLIL (in this case, meaning “immersive/intensive” rather than “difficult”) occurs when more than half of the curriculum is taught in another language. It is commonly used in international schools and bilingual education programmes.
Soft CLIL is more common. It has occasional lessons in a foreign language. For example, in language classrooms, when focusing on cultural aspects of a country, this is soft CLIL. The language of instruction is not the student’s native language, and the focus is on something other than the language.
Lessons and lesson types
There are three main types of CLIL lessons. The first is language-led CLIL, like the culture example above – a traditional language course with time spent on a subject. The second is subject-led CLIL, where specific subjects are partially taught in the target language (e.g. Calculus in English and Mandarin Chinese). The third is called partial immersion, where the proportion of teaching in another language is based on time (e.g. morning classes in English, afternoon classes in the other language).
For all CLIL lessons, structure for progression is key. Having visuals, media and graphic input to help visualise concepts, reading aloud and modelling pronunciation, group work, interaction and discourse, and even falling back on the students’ first language in a pinch are all important to get the students to understand and use the ideas they are learning about quickly.
CLIL Lesson Planning and Activities
In general, CLIL lessons follow a set pattern. Students need to have the vocabulary to deal with topics, so this is introduced first, followed by reading and listening activities to see and interact with these words in context. Next comes grammar (as needed), limited to only highly relevant structures. After comes production, with students focused on writing and speaking, thereby using these new concepts. At the end, interactive activities, including games, discussions, presentations, workshops, and other student-focused projects, finish the lesson.
Lesley suggested the following activities as especially helpful: role-playing and debates, mini-presentations and reports, interactive workshops and hands-on projects, and interactions with authentic materials such as newspapers, podcasts and videos.
Disadvantages and overcoming them
While it may be an excellent solution, CLIL has drawbacks. For example, it is harder for students and teachers to organise and operate as a concept.
Challenges
Coming into a subject-oriented class in a foreign language can be daunting for students who may have only weak knowledge of the subject or the language. If they are weaker than their peers, that could cause them to improve more rapidly or harm their confidence.
On the teaching side, there is often a lack of materials for CLIL classrooms. For example, reading comprehension texts for classic Spanish literature learners who are not natives are few and far between – and when they do exist, they are at a very high level. Assessing students’ progress is also more challenging as you have to measure two things – language and the subject. If they have a problem, is it with one aspect of the class or both?
It also becomes more challenging to manage a classroom environment, and finding qualified staff who speak not only (for example) German and English but are also qualified to teach history can be difficult.
Solutions
With advanced preparation, many of these problems can be solved before classes start. Lesley recommended tailoring lesson plans to students’ proficiency levels and creating bilingual glossaries for standardised terminology. Providing clear goals and assessment criteria that balance language and content will also give students a definite goal to study towards.
Finally, making the course engaging through technology, multimedia, discussions, and other aspects the students can engage with will turn it from a class that “has to be done” to one that students look forward to.
Bilingual CLIL outside of the classroom
CLIL is also a possible self-study method for those with discipline. Some examples include using native-level textbooks to learn and practice vocabulary in context, reading online newspapers and extracting terms, creating topic-based glossaries, watching videos and listening to podcasts on a subject, and finding others for discussion practice (e.g. in person, online, etc.) about these topics in the target language.
According to Lesley, CLIL is also helpful for translators and interpreters to learn about a new topic. We can read parallel texts and perform analyses to increase translation accuracy, improve our code-switching ability, and finally, improve our confidence in working with specialised issues.
Q&A Session
Lesley ended the session with a Q&A session, where the following questions were asked and addressed:
Q: How many languages should a child be exposed to at once?
A: Two or three languages (besides their native one) are manageable within a well-structured system, although it depends on the child and their environment.
Q: Can CLIL make grammar learning more engaging?
A: Yes! Teaching grammar in context (rather than through memorisation) improves retention.
Q: Does CLIL work better in primary or secondary education?
A: While it’s mainly used in primary schools, it’s increasingly being introduced in secondary and higher education.
Q: How can multimedia improve CLIL learning?
A: Videos and podcasts provide immersive experiences, reinforcing vocabulary and cultural understanding.
My thoughts on Bilingual Education and CLIL
I found Lesley’s presentation interesting, although not as informative as I had hoped. I am somewhat familiar with international schools, where this type of education is more typical (especially where the target language is English). It was good to hear that CLIL use is increasing slowly. Lesley did spend some time advocating for more CLIL education in mainstream schools, although I felt a bit as though she was preaching to the choir.
What I found more interesting was the idea of using it for self-study. I had always thought that CLIL was better suited to classrooms with extensive advanced preparation. I had not connected it with something I learnt extensively at university as part of my translation and interpreting degree: reading parallel texts.
As translation students, we were always told that the best way to find and validate new terms was through parallel texts. Rather than taking a list of terms and putting them through something like Google Translate, which may or may not give you the right word (but always without any context), we should look for articles that talk about the same topic in your source and target language. For example, if you are researching nanoparticles, first look for articles about “nanoparticles” in English and list essential terms. When you go looking, e.g. the word “nanoparticles” in German, the first thing you should do is think of some possible translations, such as “nanoparticles” (e.g. just using the English term, which happens sometimes in German), “Nanopartikeln” (a more direct translation), etc. Search for these possibilities until you find articles that align with the original articles in English.
If the articles seem to be discussing the same topic, start matching the German terms with the English ones. Pay special attention to how these terms are used in German, as they may be different from how they are used in English.
Before this webinar, I had not put two and two together. I had always pictured CLIL in a classroom setting, so that was certainly eye-opening.
In terms of my own education, I wish that hard CLIL had been available. I learnt Spanish in school with ocassional soft CLIL instruction sessions about culture and history, but they were vey few and far between. I ended up learning German at university with a higher amount of CLIL sessions, but it was still primarily soft CLIL when possible. I only had one German professor who had been a physicist and sometimes taught the engineering students engineering-specific (usually mechanical engineering, which was not as useful for me) knowledge, although it was all still through the context of German rather than a focus on that content.
I am trying to learn Japanese medical vocabulary recently and I think CLIL will be a good way to do that. I have been using flashcards but it has been difficult to keep everything straight. With proper context (and therefore more meaning/usefulness behind the words), it would most likely be easier to remember.