Developing CLIL

This entry it's about the article Developing CLIL: Towards a Theory to Practice by Professor Do Coyle. In the last years, CLIL has become a subject of ineterest in different sectors of European education systems, covering a wide range of geographical areas.

As Marsh says, CLIL is when a foreign language is used as a tool in the learning of a non-language subject in which both language and the subject have a joint role. That means that you use, in this case English, to teach and specific content of another subject, but doesn't mean that you use that content to teach, for example, new English vocabulary. If we ant to achieve this in a successful way  it requires that the two teachers, the specific subject and English teacher, work together  in the process of designing and developing the CLIL unit.

Research shows that CLIL can:

•  Raise learner linguistic competence and confidence;
• Raise teacher and learner expectations;
• Develop risk-taking and problem-solving skills and grammatical awareness;
• Motivate and encourage student independence;
• Take students beyond "reductive" foreign language topics;
• Encourage linguistic spontaneity (talk) if students are enabled to learn through the language rather than in the language;
• Generate positive attitudes and address gender issues in motivation and out cultural awarness back on the agenda.

Do Coyle talks about the 4c's framework that support CLIL pedagogy. As we can see at the picture, the pyramid shows that each one it's related to the other and communicaton is located in the center of the figure, but why? If we want  the CLIL to be successful we need to integrated learning to use language and use language to learn so teachers need to plan, monitor and evaluate CLIL learning and teaching from different perpsepectives.