This case study aims at exploring how teachers conceptualize integration in CLIL and understand their role as content and language facilitators in schools in the Basque Autonomous Community (Spain). It describes classroom realities while analyzing the needs for specific teacher training programs.
Although the core element in CLIL and immersion programs is the integration of language and content, it is still not clear what pedagogies teachers should employ to meet the dual-objective of CLIL. Therefore, interest lies on how in-service CLIL teachers actually integrate content with foreign language teaching. In the Basque Autonomous Community (BAC), a multilingual region in Spain, schools are implementing English-medium subjects in order to improve students’ proficiency in the foreign language (English) and foster multilingualism. This study aims at exploring how teachers in this particular setting conceptualize integration in CLIL and reflect their understanding on their role as content and language facilitators through classroom pedagogies. For that purpose, qualitative data was collected from four CLIL teachers and their classrooms in the BAC. The four participants, who teach their subjects through English, have different teaching backgrounds, two of them being content specialists and two of them being language specialists. Findings show differences between the teachers who have a content-teaching background and those who have a language-teaching background, as the former exclude themselves from the responsibility of “teaching” the foreign language and tend to focus on content-matter only. Teachers’ understanding of CLIL seem to differ in aspects related to the aims of the approach or the use of the L1 as well. The analysis of actual classroom realities will lead us to explore the needs and possibilities of specific teacher training programs for CLIL teachers in these settings.
