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Project

The ‘I’ in CLIL. ‘Integration’ in a context of Content and Language Integrated Learning: focus on the collaboration between subject and foreign language teachers and the consequences of this collaboration for their Pedagogical Practices.

CLIL is an educational innovation that was officially launched in Flanders in September 2014. The acronym CLIL stands for 'Content and Language Integrated Learning'. Hence, the name itself refers to a form of 'integration' between both the content and the (foreign) language. This integration is also referred to by the term 'dual focus' (Flemish Government, 2014, p. 7). Since it is assumed that CLIL teachers work in an 'integrated' way, i.e. pursue both content-related and linguistic goals, one can expect them to be given guidelines or to be professionalized in this respect. However, there is a lack of concrete indications concerning this cooperation between CLIL subject teachers and foreign language teachers. The Flemish government does not specify what is meant by this ‘integration’. In its CLIL report, the Flemish inspectorate therefore regrets that the dual focus or the attention to language-oriented education is not included in the definition of CLIL as used by the Flemish government. (Flemish Education Inspectorate, 2017, p. 45).  In its CLIL report, the Inspectorate notes that in many schools the cooperation between the language and CLIL teachers is deplorable and, as a result, states unequivocally in its report with recommendations at the micro level: 'Develop structural consultation between the CLIL teachers and the language teachers' (Flemish Education Inspectorate, 2017, p. 48). Questions here concern not only 'how to work together', but also 'what to work together for' and 'why work together? What do teachers do when they sit around the table together or make agreements? And how does this collaboration translate into their respective classroom practices, i.e. the didactics used in the CLIL classroom and in the foreign language classroom? The aim of this study is to investigate whether and to what extent a closer form of cooperation between the subject and the language teacher in a CLIL context contributes to the 'dual focus' in the classroom practices of the teachers involved and how this cooperation manifests itself on the classroom floor.

Date:1 Feb 2021 →  Today
Keywords:CLIL, Content and Language Integrated Learning, Teacher collaboration, Language learning, Dual focus, Didactics, Pedagogical practices
Disciplines:Didactics of school subjects, Language didactics
Project type:PhD project