CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning)

A term launched by David Marsh (Finland) and Anne Maljers (Netherlands) in 1994, Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is a dual-focused educational approach in which an additional language is used for the learning and teaching of both content and language.

CLIL has become a major educational innovation which involves competence-building in languages and communication ‘at the same time’ as developing acquisition of knowledge and skills. It’s not ‘language learning’, and it’s not ‘subject learning’. It is a ‘fusion’ of both. CLIL always involves dual-focused aims, for in a CLIL class attention is simultaneously given to both topic and language.

Although the CLIL approach has seen exponential growth, especially in Europe since 1994, successful implementation of such dual-focused learning stretches back many decades. CLIL is a generic term, which covers some 20 or more educational approaches. Schools in which the teaching of certain subjects in the curriculum may be offered in a foreign, regional or minority language have existed for several decades. Although these have differed in terminology used (immersion, languages across the curriculum, bilingual education, etc), they share certain common methodologies. CLIL was introduced as an inclusive "umbrella" term by which to capture and further develop these.

Having previously been found only in special regions, or elite forms of education, CLIL is now cascading into mainstream education. In addition, there is now greater understanding of the cognitive and development advantages of this type of education: CLIL is the platform for an innovative methodological approach far broader in scope than many forms of language teaching.

Through its dual-focussed approach, CLIL accommodates both subject-specific content and language, offering a more natural context for language development which brings an immediacy, relevance and added-value to the process of language learning. Accordingly, its advocates stress how it seeks to develop proficiency in both the non-language subject and the language in which this is taught, attaching importance to each. Achieving this twofold aim calls for the development of a special integrated approach to both teaching and learning, requiring that teachers should devote special thought not just to how languages should be taught, but to the educational process in general. .

Over and above these special considerations, CLIL and other forms of bilingual or immersion teaching share certain common features that experts are now identifying. In organisational terms, for example, CLIL enables languages to be taught on a relatively intensive basis without claiming an excessive share of the school timetable. It is also inspired by important methodological principles established by research on foreign language learning, such as the need for learners to be exposed to a situation calling for genuine communication.

Colloquially described as ‘using languages to learn and learning to use languages’, it can be viewed as the next phase of the 1970s' communicative revolution, but CLIL type provision is itself a product of a long historical background and, as such, possesses its own special methodological and organisational characteristics.

CLIL means using as you learn and learning as you use, not learning now for use later. This directly complements learning styles preferred by the newly emerging internet generation now attending schools and colleges and it is leading to very promising results with students, teachers, colleges and the communities they serve.

For the student, CLIL has been found to enable