CLIL has been claimed to be a pedagogy that supports all learners irrespective of their academic and linguistic background. I will address the pros and cons of this claim based on evidence from relevant empirical studies. Connections will be made to language-oriented content teaching and content-based language teaching in L1 and L2.
CLIL has been claimed to be a pedagogy that supports all learners irrespective of their academic and linguistic background. Integration of content and language would support content learning by scaffolding language input and interaction, and support language learning by making it more functional, engaging and relevant. However, in bilingual education (self) selection is quite common. Therefore several authors have argued that CLIL has only proven to be effective for high achieving and highly motivated students who can handle the extra challenge. For others, the additional working memory load of an integrated approach would hinder rather than facilitate their subject and language learning. In this presentation, I will address the pros and cons of the claim that CLIL pedagogy may facilitate greater fairness, equity and inclusion, based on evidence from relevant empirical studies. I will make connections to language-oriented content teaching and content-based language teaching, that aim at making content and/or language learning in L1 as well as L2 more accessible. What is the research evidence and what are the effective practices that could help researchers as well as teachers move forward?
