CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning)

During the last years the interest in CLIL has been increasing significantly in Europe. The CLIL refers to situations where subjects, or parts of subjects, are taught through a foreign language with two main goals: the learning of content and the simultaneous learning of a foreign language. But it doesn’t consists of just a translation of the lesson content into another language. The key issue is that the learner is gaining new knowledge about the 'non-language' subject while he is using (and learning) the foreign language. In this way, language is used as a medium for learning content, and the content is used in turn as a resource for learning languages. So CLIL promotes content learning to an equal position to that of foreign language learning.

Personally, I think that it’s a great idea, because sometimes teaching a language to children can be boring and non meaningful for them (sometimes students are only learning vocabulary and grammatical aspects). So this way, we can teach any curriculum area at the same time that they learn and use English in a real situation. With CLIL, the language and the non language content are placed without specifying the importance of one over the other. So it may be the best approach to incorporate a foreign language and to promote multilingualism and language diversity, so important in the fast changing world that we are living nowadays.