Philip Hood, University of Nottingham

At a time when primary schools are returning to a topic-based curriculum and the Primary Review is set to recommend an increase in skills-based, cross-curricular learning with a more flexible view of the current national curriculum of discrete subjects, CLIL has a stronger rationale than ever.

What is CLIL and how do we know that it is effective?

The ‘official’ definition, from the CLIL Consortium is: ‘CLIL is a dual-focused educational approach in which an additional language is used for the learning and teaching of both content and language.’

Teachers using immersion approaches in Canada and the USA have discovered that if the curriculum is taught through another language via sound pedagogical practice then children will learn both the content (the subject matter) and the language. They also discovered that to ensure grammatical accuracy in this language children do need more formal language lessons to accompany the immersion approach.

Compare this with the situation we have here in the UK with EAL, where incoming new arrivals benefit hugely from being immersed in the classroom and also having some more specific language work directed just at them. The combination works well as long as the teaching is good and appropriate scaffolding approaches are used.

In practice this means that providing we use natural language in manageable amounts and for real purposes, and we structure tasks carefully, children can learn both the content and the language effectively. So in an ideal CLIL lesson the written objectives will focus on the content and the thinking involved in learning it, and will consider how best to use language to enable those objectives to be met.

Evaluations of CLIL programmes in Europe have shown that children do make substantial language gains and where they have compared CLIL and non-CLIL groups, the CLIL groups have made more progress. There has not been so far sufficient research into the content learning, but there have been no indications so far that this is problematic.

Is CLIL just one approach or does it have different forms?

It can be helpful to see development in cross-curricular modern languages in four stages.

It is easy to start with surface linking where the amount of content is limited and the focus is still more on language learning. Most primary language teachers do this already – for example when teaching compass points and using a map of a target language country or when sorting foods into healthy or unhealthy groups or doing a short burst of simple mathematics in the foreign language.

The question to ask ourselves as teachers is: ‘How much is this work (geography or science or maths) like the work in that subject the children do in English? If the answer is that it’s more like the work they did in English 3 or 4 years earlier, then we can be sure that the content is really just a vehicle for language practice. It’s a good starting point and helps to bring a little more thinking into the learning, but it could not really be considered as CLIL.

When we start to build new material onto what is already known or to teach a completely new topic in the foreign language, then we have to consider the content as a very real focus in designing how we teach. For example the Year 3 objectives in Understanding Shape in the mathematics framework include: 

Read and record the vocabulary of position, direction and movement, using the four compass directions to describe movement about a grid.

If we look across to Year 4 we find:

Recognise horizontal and vertical lines; use the eight compass points to describe direction; describe and identify the position of a square on a grid of squares.

A Year 4 CLIL lesson might well start by taking the Year 3 objective and carrying out simple work around the four compass points on a grid, perhaps superimposed on a map of the country – the teacher would be using the fact that the children remember the previous year’s work encountered through English to establish the foreign language terminology, so using content familiarity to build new language knowledge.

A couple of lessons later, when the children are understanding and beginning to use that language with confidence, new content can be introduced, in this case the extra compass points and the more complex directions involved in describing relationships between places.

There has been one example in the UK of a state primary school which has moved further than this, into the fourth stage of partial or full immersion. Walker Road Primary School in Aberdeen taught partially through French for a number of years until recently and the final evaluation report (pdf) was published in 2008. It is well worth reading because it gives detailed evidence about how well the children succeeded. There is also a summary (pdf) is available on the Scottish CILT website. 

At the moment there are no other evaluated examples of full CLIL programmes in UK primary schools, although we should remember that the approaches are used continuously in EAL contexts and also in bilingual education in Wales and Scotland. But some teachers are trying smaller-scale trial lessons and short topics as the CLIL videos on this site demonstrate, and many others are discovering that to make foreign language work ‘different’ and ‘varied’ the links with other subjects are a very positive channel.

Initiatives already featured at recent conferences include material produced by West Sussex LA, North Tyneside LA, Liverpool LA and Nottinghamshire (see A La Française resource pack).

How might we start to include CLIL in our foreign language work?

As we said above, it is normal to begin to include some cross-curricular material in foreign language work through the inclusion of culture and surface links to other topics. A good starting point is the oral-mental starter section of the mathematics lesson, where careful choice of calculations supported by numbers written on the whiteboard, for example division sums which result in lower number answers or multiplication sums where one of the multipliers is gapped, can give both skills practice and a chance to hear higher numbers spoken by the teacher in a meaningful context.

So, 90 / 15 = ?? lets children hear the higher number 90 but only need to produce the easier number 6. Similarly 15 x ?? = 255 elicits the known number 17 while including an example of a number in the 100s.

Two other common starting points are science (through healthy eating or the structure of plants or types of ecosystems) and geography (through elements relating to target language speaking countries such as tourism, physical features such as rivers or mountains, or comparisons between different countries such as population-related statistics).

One very easy entry into the more complex thinking required for a content subject (when compared with the more repetition-based language learning approaches) is to structure simple decision tasks. Here children must choose between options such as yes/no to questions relating to whether certain artefacts existed at historical points – did the Vikings have chocolate/jewelry/televisions? – or options such as where an object is likely to be – in a factory/garden/town centre/office. These techniques, perhaps centred on PowerPoint presentations with visual scaffolding, actually teach the vocabulary set involved and pre-teaching of vocabulary is not necessary.

Similarly the Matisse PowerPoint included in A La Française and also available in German, uses common animals in multi-choice questions designed to elicit the names of two Matisse collages, the wolf and the snail. Children may already know the words for cat and dog which appear as distractors here, but it actually does not matter if they do not, as they will learn them through this approach.

Often the questions asked in a CLIL context may have a range of answers (such as happens normally in content subjects across the curriculum). This enables a teacher to ask the same question to several different pupils because there may be different answers, and this type of repetition sets up a more natural language-rich classroom, where children hear the target language more frequently without this being done simply for the sake of fixing the language forms.

It forms the kind of comprehensible input which Krashen wrote about in his work during the 1980s and 1990s and which underpins real communicative language teaching as well as CLIL. In addition it also takes the ‘parroting’ pressure away from children where they are required to repeat without a real reason for doing so. In fact children are more likely to want to speak in the target language if there is a message to deliver than if they are simply asked to do so in order to practise the language.

Some teachers may feel that this is very demanding on their own language competence, but it is important to remember that children will learn best if the language is rich but controlled to include more cognates and to avoid excess complexity. Questioning and the tasks set must always be broken into manageable stages and be clear and well supported with visuals and mime and with references to prior learning. So by scripting the input carefully and building from a simpler base teachers help pupils to build both confidence and competence effectively.

CLIL brings other dimensions of interest into language classes, offers hands-on work, for example through science and maths investigations and brings language work into the whole curriculum, joining it up rather than making it something separate. The CLIL4teachers website will carry more and more material appropriate for primary teachers and in this, just as in all new curricular adventures, sharing of ideas and approaches as well as materials is paramount.