About CLIL

CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) is the most common term to describe the approach to teaching a curriculum subject through a foreign language, with the dual focus of acquiring more subject knowledge and improving one’s skills and competences in the foreign language. Ioannou-Georgiou and Pavlos Pavlou (2011).

CLIL is a dual-focused educational approach in which an additional language is used for the learning and teaching of both content and language. That is, in the teaching and learning process, there is a focus not only on content, and not only on language. Each is interwoven, even if the emphasis is greater on one or the other at a given time. Coyle, Hood and Marsh (2010).

Why one should study it?

CLIL has a great deal of potential. The benefits of the approach do not limit themselves to the improvement of language skills and subject knowledge. CLIL also offers the opportunity for learners to develop their intercultural knowledge and understanding as well as their intercultural communication skills. Moreover, inherent in CLIL there is a support and promotion of more general and comprehensive dimension to learning. The approach promotes the development of diverse learning strategies, the application of innovative teaching methods and techniques and the increase of learner motivation. Ioannou-Georgiou and Pavlos Pavlou 2011.

In the long term, students learn both the content and the new language as well as, if not better than, students who study content and language in separate classes. Montalto, Walter, Theodorou, and Chrysanthou 

Is there only one way of teaching through CLIL?

There are numerous models of implementation which are included under the “umbrella term” of CLIL. This, however, means that CLIL is being defined as flexibly or as narrowly as a context requires it. This ‘stretching’ of the term can cause problems, misunderstandings and miscommunications. It is, therefore, important for the term to be defined more carefully and, as long as it is still used as an umbrella term, each context needs to specifically define its own interpretation of CLIL. Ioannou-Georgiou and Pavlos Pavlou 2011.

Do the students need to know the Additional Language before starting a course with the educational approach CLIL?

Students aren’t expected to be proficient in the new language before they begin studying. They learn the language they need for studying at the same time as they learn the subject.