BALANCING CONTENT AND LANGUAGE IN CLIL: The Integration of Cognitive Load Theory into Teacher Training

Seeing language and content as equal drivers in CLIL does not only require an awareness of the respective teaching methodologies for content and language, but also an in-depth understanding of the functions of language on the part of the CLIL teacher. This needs to include a repertoire of resources for using language as a tool for learning the subject, mastering discipline-specific discourse, and responding to different levels of students’ foreign language proficiency. However, content teachers at tertiary level, are often quite reluctant to consider themselves responsible for language development since they neither have the linguistic background nor the necessary pedagogical training to teach their content in a foreign language. Content is always prioritized in their classes as subject specialists have difficulties making informed methodological choices which should ultimately support their students’ language development. In a sense, they hardly see content and language as a fusion (see for example Dalton-Puffer et al. 2010) or as a transversal element (see for example Ball 2015) which may support the integration of content and language better and more effectively. In our paper, we present a teacher-training programme which may encourage content teachers to see the power of language more clearly by uniting elements of cognition, content and language. Based on our experiences with the training programme, we conducted a small-scale study in the form of interviews and stimulated recall sessions in which content teachers expressed their views on why they engage with language or not and how they envisage a more language-sensitive CLIL teacher training programme. Ball, P. (2016). Using language (s) to develop subject competences in CLIL-based practice. PULSO. Revista de Educación, 15-34. Dalton—Puffer, C., Nikula, T., & Smit, U. (2010). Language use and language learning in CLIL: Current ï¬