READING 7: CLIL and Foreign Language Learning

READING 7: CLIL and Foreign Language Learning

by Yolanda Ruiz

CLIL has a very important relevance in Europe, where it is being used in many schools as a source to create a multilingual population.  CLIL has the common goal in everywhere it is used and it is seen as a flexible system which can be adapted to children necessities. Besides, CLIL develops the communicative competence by using the language to study a content-based subject.

However, CLIL has some negatives point, like the lack of formation of the teachers, who are in most cases not able to develop a subject through a foreign language. Despite of that, these ones who teach though CLIL programmes obtains better results than these ones who teach English as a foreign language.

In Spain CLIL programmes have been increasing since it could help students to use the language in a meaningful way so it would be easier to learn.

We can consult a research that compare the linguistic competence of students that use CLIL programmes with the linguistic competence of these ones who don't use them. Three groups of different school students were evaluated of five categories: Pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, fluency and content.

The results show that CLIL students have better speech productions than these ones who don't participate in CLIL programmes. So Content and Language integrated learning could help students to develop their communicative competence and to be effective in their communicative situations.