Educating the educators – Which teacher competences are crucial for providing successful CLIL education?

As a result of the increased popularity of CLIL, more and more CLIL schools are established in Germany (cf. KMK 2013). Though the success of CLIL seems to be commonly agreed on, some research also casts doubt on the quality of CLIL provision (cf. Fehlinger 2005, Rumlich 2016). As these studies found out, the participating CLIL students are not (yet) able to live up to the high expectations of CLIL. One reason for falling short of these expectations is the lack of appropriately trained CLIL teachers. Though a formal CLIL teaching qualification is not mandatory in Germany, teachers still have the advantage of being trained in two subjects, i.e. ideally for CLIL provision in a content subject and a foreign language. However, CLIL teaching goes beyond the mere content and language teaching qualification – CLIL needs to integrate both perspectives. Hence, specialised teacher training programmes for CLIL are indispensable. The talk presents a German Framework for CLIL Teacher Education, which is the result of a qualitative study systematising the expectations of CLIL teacher education. Taking the theoretical perspective of European suggestions on CLIL teacher education (cf. Marsh et al. 2011, Bertaux et al. 2010) as well as the practical perspective of experienced CLIL teachers (via 13 expert interviews) into account, the framework was developed with the help of Qualitative Content Analysis (cf. Kuckartz 2016). The identified set of competences is compared to and juxtaposed with the elements of general teacher training in Germany and classified with regard to the competence areas they target. Based on this classification, the framework serves as a basis for developing CLIL teacher training programmes for (future) CLIL teachers with different educational backgrounds, such as teachers who are already trained as language teachers in contrast to teachers who are not qualified as language teachers.