Primary schools are increasingly adopting a CLIL approach to language teaching, at a time that the linguistic diversity of pupils has increased significantly. We report on research that integrates expertise from EAL and early-English teachers in the UK and Netherlands to inform our understanding of quality CLIL in multilingual settings.
The number of primary schools in Europe adopting a CLIL approach to language teaching has risen sharply in recent years. At the same time, the cultural and linguistic diversity of pupils in primary education has increased significantly. This places new demands on primary school teachers associated not only with the integration of content and language didactics, but also the incorporation of more multilingual approaches that have been shown to support the inclusion and integration of minority learners (Liu et al., 2017). Established CLIL research is as yet able to provide only partial answers to the question of how the integration of content and languages is achieved at the classroom level (Llinares, 2015; San Isidro, 2018). This paper reports on research bringing together the expertise and teachers' practical knowledge from the English as an additional language (EAL) context in the UK, with that from the early English teaching context in the Netherlands. Through the use of interviews incorporating a 'CLIL Teaching Wall' activity, the research was able to gain valuable insights into teachers' practical knowledge as a vital source of information within our understanding of what makes CLIL successful in multilingual primary education settings. A framework of teacher pedagogical knowledge of the integration of languages in the content area will be presented, and implications for CLIL professional development and research will be discussed.
Liu, Y., Fisher, L., Forbes, K., & Evans, M. (2017). The knowledge base of teaching in linguistically diverse contexts: 10 grounded principles of multilingual classroom pedagogy for EAL. Language and Intercultural Communication, 17(4), 378–395.
Llinares, A. (2015). Integration in CLIL: A proposal to inform research and successful pedagogy. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 28(1), 58–73.
San Isidro, X. (2018). Innovations and challenges in CLIL implementation in Europe. Theory Into Practice, 57(3), 185–195.
