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 agreemore.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 ‘CoreCLILConstruct’: 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 howscience 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.
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 agreemore.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 ‘CoreCLILConstruct’: 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 howscience 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.
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 agreemore.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 ‘CoreCLILConstruct’: 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 howscience 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.
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 Sierras (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 signicantly renovate both content education and language instruction throughwhat I call a Core CLIL Construct: a way of reasoning. Inturn, this Construct provides classroom teachers with three concrete CLIL Operands: ways of proceeding. I would like to drawthe attention of the EFL community tohowscienceeducators are usingthese same CLIL notions to signicantly improve science education. Since EFL practitioners are in a prime position to contribute to this effort to renovate twenty-rst 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 biochemists dream job of teaching Science in English to Italianhighschool students brains withthe instructionuse CLIL. Without concrete guidelines and being of a positivistic mindset, I interpreted the acronym mathematically and began implementing CLIL science learning contexts througha 50:50/content:language ratio(Ting 2010) whichattends 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 reasoningthe Core CLIL Constructwhich 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 learnernot the teacher is acquiring, using, and mastering the foreign language (FL). Inturn, this Construct automatically provides teachers three very concrete ways of proceeding: three CLIL Operands. The rst twocome fromthe fact that we have chosento use anFL for content education: rst 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 The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. ELT Journal Advance Access published May 2, 2011
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Operand 2 thus asks Can learners use language effectively to obtain information, negotiate understanding, discuss hypotheses, and convey knowledge? Therefore, no matter how perfect the teachers English, a teacher blabbing about physics in English is not CLIL because CLIL attends to the learners ability to use language. CLIL thus shifts classroom dynamics away from teacher-centred lecturing to learner-centred learning. This alone is reason for 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 teacher realizes that the input language must be comprehensible, it comes naturally to also consider whether the input content is comprehensible. CLIL Operand 3 thus asks Is the content presented in chewable and digestible aliquots? The owchart inFigure 1 illustrates howthe Core CLIL Construct coordinates the three CLIL Operands. CLIL thus implements language-aware instruction which naturally leads to content-aware education. Interestingly, that language-aware instruction positively supports content-aware education was the focus of Science (volume 328, April 2010) in which science educators extensively cited Halliday and Martins (1993) landmark volume Writing Science, recognizing that the language of science is alienating, if not downright annoying. In fact, when our teachers adopted that concise and authoritative tone to explain strange-sounding phenomena which our young minds could neither see nor fathom, they transformed our mother tongue into a foreign language (Snow 2010)! Well, imagine learning science in an FL: the challenges of an immersion-like curriculum without the advantages of immersion-like extra-curricularity! No need to imagine: Webb (2010) reportedthat whenex-anglophonecolonies inAfricausedEnglish, anelitist FL, to teach science, dismal results were obtained. However, the situation was redeemed when science educators realized that, since the language of instruction was an FL, they had to ensure that the language of instruction was comprehensible: CLIL Operand 1. The notion speak so learners understand is obvious for EFL practitioners who are naturally language- aware instructors, whether the topic is The Beatles or antioxidants. This is the rst reasonthe EFL community shouldtake note of CLIL: EFL expertise, probably more than that in any other arena of education, is naturally positioned for developing language-aware content education. Not surprisingly, as the African science educators became increasingly more language aware, they basically came to CLIL Operand 2: What are the learners able to do with the language? Although the sine qua non of EFL instruction, this question prompted science educators to implement more student-led hands-on experimentations, transforming teacher-centred lecturing into learner-centred learning which automatically increases opportunities for learners to language their learning. To their credit, these science educators took language-aware instruction even further to cultivate learners ability to language scientically i.e. write and speak logically, coherently, precisely, and objectively. They realized that the processes of speaking and writing are necessary for transforming hands-on learning into minds-on understanding (Webb op.cit.). Ever since Cummins (1981) 2 of 4 Y.L.Teresa Ting
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entered BICS (basic interpersonal communication skills) and CALP (cognitive academic language prociency) into our professional lexicon 30 years ago, EFL practitioners have developed methods to engage learners in the deep-level cognitive processes needed for transforming informal classroom discussions into formal academic reports. In fact, regardless of the subject matter or whether it is our L1 or an FL, attending to howlearners are languaging understanding automatically puts literacy onthe learning gure 1 Coordination of the three CLI L Operands by the Core CLI L Construct CLI L . . . not only not immersion 3 of 4
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agenda (Swain2006; Pearson, Moje, andGreenleaf 2010). The fact that EFL expertise languages comfortably between BICS and CALP is the second reason the EFL community should take note of CLIL. Therefore, although prompted by different reasons for merging science education with FL instruction, science educators in ex-anglophone colonies in Africa and CLIL practitioners in Europe have none the less reached the similar realizationthat content educationcanbenet greatly fromlanguage- aware instruction. And EFL practitioners are in a prime position to contribute. Given content-learning objectives dened by content experts, EFL practitioners have the necessary expertise for designing ad hoc CLIL learning contexts which are not only learner centred, content driven, and literacy directed but also fall within the comfort zones of both EFL and content teachers. Considering that most of the world does not have immersion-like possibilities, CLIL is not only not immersion (Lasagabaster andSierra op.cit.) but, done well andunder the tutorage of the EFL community, is revealing itself to be much more than the sum of its parts. Final revised version received January 2011 References Cummins, J. 1981. Age on arrival and immigrant second language learning in Canada: a reassessment. Applied Linguistics 11/2: 13249. Halliday, M. A. K. and J. R. Martin. 1993. Writing Science. London: Falmer Press. Lasagabaster, D. and J. M. Sierra. 2010. Immersion and CLIL in English: more differences than similiarites. ELT Journal 64/4: 36775. Marsh, D. 2005. Adding language without taking away. Guardian Weekly, 8 April. Available at http:// www.guardian.co.uk/guardianweekly/story/ 0,12674,1464367,00.html (accessedon20February 2011). Pearson, P. D., E. Moje, and C. Greenleaf. 2010. Literacy andscience: eachinthe service of the other. Science 328: 45963. Snow, C. E. 2010. Academic language and the challenge of reading for learning about science. Science 328: 4502. Swain, M. 2006. Languaging, agency and collaboration in advanced second language prociency 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 brain likes its information: examples from CLIL- (Neuro)Science. International CLIL Research Journal 1/3: 118. Available at http://www.icrj.eu/13-73 (accessed on 26 October 2010). Webb, P. 2010. Science education and literacy: imperatives for the developed anddeveloping world. Science 328: 44850. The author Y.L. Teresa Ting divides her assistant professorship between the Faculty of Sciences and the Department of Linguistics of the University of Calabria in southern Italy. She is also the coordinator of the CLIL- ICLHE (Integrating Content and Learning in Higher Education) Division of the University Language Centre. These responsibilities give her the opportunity to collaborate with both content and foreign language teachers at all levels of instruction in order to research and implement more effective learning environments for CLIL and ICLHE. Email: yltting1@gmail.com 4 of 4 Y.L.Teresa Ting
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