clil: complementing or compromising · clil-type provision and to underpin proliferation policies...

CLIL: Complementing or Compromising Foreign Language Teaching?

Effects and Perspectives of Education Policy Plans

Stephan Breidbach / Britta Viebrock

This chapter serves as an introduction to this volume as well as a contextualisation of the other contributions. The main focus is on current developments in education policy to introduce CLIL to a wider range of learners. By and large, the political discourse is characterised by tremendous optimism concerning the potential of CLIL. Either CLIL is understood as a better way of foreign language learning or it is considered to cover two topical areas (language and subject matter competence) for “the price of one”. Scientific research considers CLIL as a more complex endeavour and affords a more critical stance also hinting at possible risks for all groups of stakeholders. The papers in this compilation show that first and foremost CLIL needs to be done properly, i.e. theory-driven, informed by empirical evidence and sensitive to specific learning contexts to be-come a success story.

1 Introduction Content and Language Integrated Learning has received a strong tailwind over the past decades. CLIL programmes have become a well-established option in different educational settings across Europe; they are on the verge to becoming a mainstream phenomenon in education. Research on CLIL has increased accord-ingly. Education authorities have readily accepted these developments. In na-tional and European education policy, CLIL has been appreciated in particular for its assumed capacity to promote foreign language learning and multilingual-ism as well as cognitive flexibility, all of which ideally result in international cooperation, transnational mobility and European integration (e.g. Eurydice 2006). In this respect, CLIL seems to be a powerful tool, if not the prototypical approach for achieving central educational objectives of European concern. Judging by the mainstream discourse alone, CLIL could be understood as a more effective approach to foreign language learning than any more traditional programme, and quite a number of stakeholders in the field of language educa-tion have readily adopted this perspective.

Taking a first glance at the considerable amount of research results available, education authorities would not have to go far in order to claim the success of CLIL-type provision and to underpin proliferation policies aiming at main-streaming CLIL. However, a closer inspection of such policies and their con-comitant official political documents reveals that these are not necessarily based on differentiated discussions of empirical evidence. We may, of course, grant that political documents issued by education authorities aim at sparking educa-

� Stephan Breidbach / Britta Viebrock 12

tional innovations and convincing possible stakeholders in the process of im-plementation. Thus, a rhetoric that priorises positive assumptions over critical considerations can be expected to be a typical attribute of such official docu-ments. As Bonnet cogently observes:

The powerful metaphors of ‘two for the price of one’ and the ‘added value of CLIL’ which seem to have become an accepted truth rather than hypotheses to be checked are currently creating a powerful atmosphere of optimism and almost limitless belief into the magic of this approach. (Bonnet 2012: 66)

CLIL has been annexed politically to promote educational aims at European and national levels. However, a similar phenomenon can be observed in language pedagogy where CLIL has long since been adopted as a kind of panacea for the shortcomings not only of grammar-based teaching methods but also of the communicative approach itself (Breidbach 2007). Here, CLIL has been associ-ated with notions such as authenticity with respect to both content and commu-nication as opposed to classrooms falling short of topics relevant to learners and producing badly orchestrated mock-communication of no real concern to any-one. At the same time, schools have discovered CLIL as a distinguishing feature to attract the more able learners.

When looking at CLIL in its specifically European version, i.e. teaching a non-linguisitc subject through a foreign language to mainstream learners, we cannot but state that CLIL is undergoing a phase of commodification. There are two imminent problems arising from this situation. First, the success of CLIL may eventually defeat its own purpose through bringing CLIL to the mainstream classroom on the assumption that CLIL for all will work as well as it apparently does for a chosen few at the moment (for a more in depth-discussion see Breid-bach/Viebrock 2012). Secondly, CLIL may also have a problematic washback effect to foreign language teaching. Such doubts have been raised more than a decade ago by Decke-Cornill. While CLIL may no longer be as heavily “under-theorised” (Decke-Cornill 1999: 165) as she perceived the situation in the late 1990s, other issues remain which we paraphrase here (cf. 165ff.): • To what extent does the implementation of CLIL compromise the autonomy

of the language subjects in the long run? • Will we see a return of teacher-centred classrooms through CLIL and the

gradual disappearance of learner-centred pedagogies? • Will CLIL boost the trend towards English as a lingua franca at the cost of

pedagogies for plurilingualism? This brings us back to the observation that even though CLIL is seen by many as a powerful approach to language learning, it may have undesired side-effects counteracting other purposes concerning classroom pedagogies or long-term goals in European integration policies. Against this backdrop, the central aim of

















CLIL: Complementing or Compromising Foreign Language Teaching? 13

this book is to link empirical CLIL research results with the relevance and posi-tioning of CLIL in the education policy discourse. On the one hand, the articles collected here contribute to a more systematic evidence base of CLIL that has been called for on a European level. On the other hand, they reflect research outcomes in the light of developments in education policy. The individual chap-ters focus on the reconstruction of learning processes as well as learner achievement. They also critically reflect the current “CLIL boom” and provide theory-driven analyses on a conceptual level.

Technically, this volume is a compilation of selected papers presented at the 4th International Langscape Conference held at the Goethe University of Frank-furt/Main and in the CLIL section of the 24th Congress of Deutsche Gesellschaft für Fremdsprachenforschung (German Society for Foreign and Second Lan-guage Research) held at the University of Hamburg in 2011.1 It is a bilingual volume with both English and German contributions. The articles are arranged in five topical areas, which will be explained in the following chapters: concep-tual reflections, CLIL teachers and teacher education, learning processes and learner achievement, aspects of motivation and – coming full circle – education policy and critical reflections.

2 Conceptual Reflections Conceptual reflections concerning CLIL prove to be diverse. Depending on in-dividual expertise and perspectives, they are inspired by various schools of thought. In general, it is probably safe to say that they are motivated by reflec-tions on educational settings in general, i.e. the organisation of institutional learning and any kind of stakeholder influence, on the position and develop-ments of education authorities, i.e. influential policy documents, and on the de-mands and needs of classroom interaction. In this context, a distinction between CLIL as programme and CLIL as subject proves to be helpful. Reflections on CLIL as programme are usually concerned with more comprehensive structures and questions of implementation whereas CLIL as subject considerations often focus on the organisation of lessons and content. The contributions to this part mirror the diversity of conceptual reflections.

The opening move in this book is taken by Peeter Mehisto’s attempt at Inte-grating CLIL with other mainstream discourses. In a broad approach he exam-ines ideas from disciplines beyond the usual scope of CLIL and analyses their contribution to CLIL programme development. Drawing on concepts such as professional learning communities, stakeholder influences and decision-making,

��1 We wish to thank Annika Kreft for her dedication and accurate work on the manuscripts as well as Mariella Veneziano-Osterrath for her meticulous proofreading.


distributed leadership, cognition and cooperation, Mehisto moves to a more ab-stract level, which does not understand the issues of CLIL research and imple-mentation merely on the subject-level and which does not define its peculiarities in the fact that instruction and learning take place in a foreign language. On the contrary, Mehisto argues that CLIL is an educational endeavour that cannot be understood independent of the complexities of education in general and hence needs to be informed just as much by educational research from primarily mono-lingual contexts as by original CLIL research.

Bettina Deutsch takes a different point of departure by comparatively analys-ing official documents on multi-/plurilingualism and CLIL endorsed by the European Commission, the European Parliament, or the Council of Europe for their conceptual overlay. She shows that the European concepts of societal mul-tilingualism and individual plurilingualism have undergone a significant shift in meaning towards a greater awareness of the general value attached to particular languages as well as individual language learning profiles for the benefit of mul-tilingual societies. However, Deutsch points out that while CLIL’s contribution to foreign language learning had been proposed early in the White Paper on Education and Training (European Commission 1995), the shift towards indi-vidualised language learning profiles including the significance of heritage lan-guages is not substantially mirrored in the subsequent European documents on CLIL. In effect, CLIL is still understood as a more efficient way of learning European foreign languages and remains largely unconnected to the conceptual developments concerning multi-/plurilingualism.

Henriette Dausend, Daniela Elsner and Jörg-U. Keßler report on a longitudi-nal case study at a primary school in Hamburg, Germany, where CLIL is offered in self-directed settings. One question that arises is how learners who are only just learning to read and write are able to work in a self-directed manner in a foreign language. Based on pre- and post-test results as well as interview data from teachers, learners and parents, the authors suggest a model for primary CLIL in self-directed learning situations. This model resembles a lock with four gates (forms of organisation, method, content, language/communication), which – metaphorically speaking – must never be opened at the same time, otherwise learners will be submerged in the complexity of the learning environment. Dausend, Elsner and Keßler conclude that primary CLIL and foreign language learning will be impossible without some structural support/scaffolding.

3 CLIL Teachers and Teacher Education The navigation and balancing of stakeholder influence on different levels has been identified as one of the key factors in the success of CLIL programmes. Teachers are often considered as important stakeholder figures since they are












located at the intersection of theory and practice, of policy and implementation, of abstract planning and actual classroom practice. Bearing this in mind, it comes as a surprise that, at present, structured CLIL teacher education pro-grammes are offered only at a limited number of institutions. With the European Language Teacher a model was initiated that highlighted the need for CLIL-specific elements in teacher education across Europe (see Grenfell et al. 2003). At the same time, this model does not consider CLIL elements as a part of the initial training phase, but rather places CLIL training within the context of fur-ther education. Thus, CLIL-specific teacher education and research will be an additional focus of this volume with contributions looking at teacher education programmes in different European countries as well as the impact of CLIL prac-titioner research on teacher education in general and the implementation of CLIL programmes in particular.

Özlem Etus places CLIL within a discussion of worldwide mobility and inte-gration, but also within the context of competitive international labour markets. She argues that the increase of “transnational flows” requires new paradigms in education as well as teacher training. CLIL programmes seem to offer a good way of meeting the challenges present-day learners are confronted with, as the author shows by discussing theoretical, ideological, socio-political and eco-nomic aspects of CLIL implementation in Turkey. After having sketched a his-torical survey of CLIL approaches at various levels in the Turkish educational system, Özlem Etus turns to current reforms in language education in order to examine future possibilities of CLIL and CLIL teacher development in pre-service language teacher education programmes. One of the problems she identi-fies is a rather uniform curriculum with little flexibility as opposed to the diver-sity of requirements to be met by contemporary education and the need for a more individualised teacher training.

The CLIL teacher’s identity is in focus of the research by Lauretta D’Angelo. From a sample of teachers who have received special training in either language teaching or content matter teaching, she examines teachers’ responses to the par-ticular demands CLIL poses on them. D’Angelo’s interview study reveals that these challenges perceived by the teachers trigger positive effects concerning their attitude and motivation: The teachers report to have re-discovered the “pleasures” of their profession which are accompanied by a positive self-perception and a sense of expertise based personal experiences. Hence, the in-troduction of innovative programmes such as CLIL challenging established teaching routines may serve as a catalyst for a personal pedagogical and meth-odological recreation.

Based on a similar design, Francesca Costa examines content lecturers’ views on CLIL at tertiary level. In her article she reflects on case studies of and inter-views with four university CLIL teachers focusing on their attention to language


as well as input presentation techniques. Apart from discrepancies between the content lecturers’ views and their teaching practices, Costa shows that the teach-ers’ sense of professional identity is that of a content expert who does not feel obliged to focus on explicit language work. In conclusion, Costa states a need for a different training of CLIL teachers which includes linguistic aspects and reflections on the nature of all learning as language-based. She suggests to work with the teachers’ mindsets as a starting point for awareness-raising.

Mehisto’s view that stakeholders exert a decisive influence on the implemen-tation of any educational innovation, thus also the development of large-scale CLIL programmes, is echoed in Julia Hüttner and Christiane Dalton-Puffer’s chapter. They distinguish between indirectly involved stakeholders such as pol-icy makers or education authorities and directly involved stakeholders such as classroom agents. Their main interest lies on the influences exerted by teachers’ mindsets on language acquisition/learning in the process of CLIL programme implementation. Teachers’ mindsets have been identified as influential factors on teachers’ actions of any kind. Hüttner and Dalton-Puffer argue that the suc-cess story of CLIL welcomed by the education authorities is closely intertwined with the orientation of teachers’ mindsets, which in turn contain similar beliefs on the language learning potential and other assumed capacities of CLIL.

The focal point in the contribution by Petra Burmeister, Michael Ewig, Eve-lyn Frey and Marisa Rimmele are student teachers’ actions and planning proc-esses. The paper reports on a Biology-TEFL class at the Polytechnic of Teacher Education (PH Weingarten), which was offered to provide CLIL-specific teacher training at university level. The authors hypothesise that the students’ major subjects (either languages or a non-linguistic subject) have a significant influence on lesson planning and lead to teaching scenarios that emphasise ei-ther explicit language work or have a strong focus on content matter. The data obtained by means of group discussion and guided interviews confirms this hy-pothesis and supports the conclusion that the “culture” of each subject/discipline (cf. Bonnet 2000) as well as the function of language for the construction and communication of content matter (cf. Leisen 2010) need to be reflected in the planning process. As a conclusion, Burmeister et al. suggest to establish inter-disciplinary planning teams to integrate the norms/approaches of different scien-tific communities.

4 Learning Processes and Achievement It is commonly accepted that the quality of the learning outcome depends to a large extent on the quality of the learning process. Because of the complex methodological implications, it is rare to find research investigating both per-spectives in a single study. This section of this book brings together research












from both perspectives precisely to highlight these implications and to illustrate what each approach can contribute to the understanding of the mechanics of learning in CLIL and their specific outcomes in terms of learners’ achievement.

Within a socio-cognitive theoretical framework, Irina Adriana Hawker exam-ines strategies and underlying knowledge employed by primary English school students in CLIL settings. She examines learners’ strategies during semantic processing in such cases in particular where the relationship between linguistic expression, propositional content and cognitive concept need to be worked out and understood. As an outcome of her explorative analysis, Hawker proposes a strategy model divided into four areas: procedural knowledge referring to infor-mation management and learning tools; personal knowledge referring to higher order thinking skills; both linguistic and discourse knowledge referring to lan-guage-oriented and genre-informed strategies. This model provides a tentative understanding of the complexity of learning mechanisms and the strategies (young) learners resort to in CLIL settings.

The well-established line of research focusing on CLIL’s potential for foreign language learning/acquisition, linguistic competence and language awareness is continued by Dominik Rumlich. His large-scale longitudinal study on the De-velopment of North Rhine-Westphalian CLIL Students (DENOCS) aims at a detailed analysis of possible CLIL effects over a period of two years. Drawing on a sample of nearly one thousand Grade six learners of English, the pre-CLIL test of general English proficiency shows that designated CLIL students, who on a regular basis receive additional language instruction, perform significantly bet-ter than regular students. An analysis of a subsample of 110 learners, who were divided into CLIL and non-CLIL learners only after a shared preparatory phase, shows a relatively small effect of the teacher, but the importance of individual learner’s dispositions and characteristics. As one future outcome of his currently on-going study, Rumlich intends to be able to determine effects that can actually be attributed to CLIL and not to the learners’ general cognitive capacities.

Potential language learning processes in CLIL are also at the core of Ulrich Wannagat’s contribution. In a qualitative approach, he analyses classroom dis-course of history CLIL learners in North Rhine-Westphalia. In a series of lesson transcripts, Wannagat retraces the learners’ content-oriented English language use for “authentic” problem-solving situations. The analysis shows that learners become attentive to linguistic problems, explore hypotheses and put possible L2-expressions and forms to the test. Wannagat’s main finding is that the learn-ers’ not yet fully developed language competence leads to more thoroughly re-flected L2-productions as well as the learners’ greater awareness of how to ver-balise their ideas.


5 Aspects of Motivation The motivational character of CLIL seems to have large face validity for teach-ers (see the papers in part 3 of this book). More often than not, one might sus-pect the motivation to occur as a result of a general “spirit of innovation” that is connected to the implementation of new educational endeavours. Whether the CLIL approach can be accounted for a sustainable increase in motivation still needs to be proved. Quite fittingly, the contributions to this part of the book look at the motivational potential of CLIL for aspects beyond the actual CLIL class-room. CLIL seems to hold some potential for reform in language learning and changes in attitude (towards negatively connoted subjects or languages).

Marie-Anne Hansen-Pauly reflects on similarities and differences between vehicular languages and languages as subjects in the educational system of Lux-embourg in order to assess to what extent CLIL provides a “new momentum for learning”. Technically, much of the learning that has always taken place in plurilingual Luxembourg would qualify as some form of CLIL, but since it usu-ally happens as incidental learning in one of the national languages rather than in a taught foreign language, it has not been discussed as CLIL. Migration and mobility have exerted a great influence on the language learning classroom in Luxembourg, which is characterised by increasing diversity and a high degree of multilingualism. This complex linguistic situation has to be taken up in teacher training, which ideally devotes a good part of the curriculum to reflections on the diverse functions of language in the learning process (including concepts such as ‘everyday’ language and academic language), the variety of competence levels in a plurilingual learner population as well as issues of linguistic and cul-tural mediation. Hansen-Pauly suggests that an awareness of the importance of language for all kinds of learning should be raised in all (future) teachers. The author presents and analyses a number of CLIL related teaching scenarios as sample material in teacher education for reflection on crucial aspects of lan-guage in content-based learning.

Next to existing multilingualism in the classroom, language attitudes may also be considered an influential factor which needs to be considered when imple-menting CLIL. The negative image of German as a language with a supposedly “hard” pronunciation and difficult grammatical rules as well as negative stereo-types towards Germany in the Netherlands, Belgium and France form the start-ing points for Katja Lochtman and Vinciane Devaux’s study. They investigate whether the CLIL approach can be exploited for a change in attitude and lan-guage learning motivation. Assuming that negative attitudes cause negative learning outcomes, the authors argue that CLIL may offer a more favourable context to support the students’ open-mindedness towards the German language and its communities of speakers. They substantiate this claim in an empirical case study arguing that the turn away from the explicit discussion of linguistic










and cultural aspects towards a vehicular use of German might indeed decrease stereotypes and negative attitudes.

Similarly, Katharina Prüfer studies the effects of implementing CLIL modules (cf. also Abendroth-Timmer 2007) in the mathematics classroom on motivation for learning mathematics. Prüfer applies a ranking system for identifying the learner cohorts who like/dislike mathematics and the English language respec-tively. One of the most interesting aspects of this approach certainly is the gen-der bias with only boys listing mathematics in the top 25% of their subjects and mostly girls listing it in the bottom 25% as well as mostly girls listing English in the top 25%. Hence, what is up for discussion here is whether the CLIL ap-proach may offer a much needed backdoor for increasing female learners’ moti-vation towards mathematics. However, the sample size of Prüfer’s pilot study is not large enough for drawing valid conclusions, the results seem to suggest posi-tive effects of employing CLIL modules in the mathematics classrooms for most learner types.

6 Education Policy and Critical Reflections Even though the CLIL approach is still accompanied by tremendous – and often simplistic – optimism as to its potential of meeting all kinds of educational chal-lenges of the 21st century, the Great Expectations, as Andreas Bonnet and Chris-tiane Dalton-Puffer call them, are increasingly reconsidered more carefully in scholarly research. In the German context, for example, recent empirical studies display a more critical attitude towards the pre-supposed “added value” of CLIL and try to shed light on the complexity of the field – by studying learner popula-tions of various abilities such as underachievers (cf. Apsel 2012) or multilingual learners (Rauschelbach in progress). For the latter, CLIL is not so much a sec-ond language learning activity, but rather involves three or four languages at various competence levels. Many of the prevalent CLIL models must therefore be criticised for assuming more or less homogeneous classrooms with little lin-guistic diversity or other variation in learner characteristics. The relatively large number of contributions to this part of the book is another indication for the im-portance of critical reflections in the scholarly discourse on CLIL.

The observation that CLIL is “moving into the mainstream” and thus needs to be conceptualised for a larger number of different kinds of learners is also the starting point for Andreas Bonnet and Christiane Dalton-Puffer’s reflections of Competence and standard related questions concerning CLIL. After having re-constructed the claims attached to CLIL such as the potential for foreign lan-guage acquisition, mental flexibility and higher order thinking skills, learner autonomy, reflective competences and so forth, the authors scrutinize these claims by reviewing the existing empirical research in three different areas: lan-

clil: complementing or compromising · clil-type provision and to underpin proliferation policies...

Documents