Modernizing Educational Practice: Perspectives in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL)

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is an innovative approach referring to educational settings where a language different from the learners mother tongue is used as a medium of instruction. This other language is found to be used from kindergarten to the tertiary level, and the extent of its use may range from occasional foreign language texts in individual subjects to covering the whole curriculum. The changes in the technological, economic and social realities of the modern world have led, and still lead, to more frequent contact between people of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Globalisation has made the world interconnected; the world is rapidly becoming a mixed global village where the role of languages is extremely important. In such an integrated world, integrated learning is viewed as a modern form of educational delivery. CLIL represents an increasingly popular approach to language teaching and learning not only in Europe, but also in other countries such as Japan, Malaysia, China, and the United Arab Emirates. Even though CLIL is not of a uniform nature and varies across the world, one of the main arguments for its introduction is that it creates conditions for naturalistic language learning. This book represents selected presentations given at the Ustro CLIL 2013 conference, which brought together academicians, researchers, teachers and educational authorities from all over the world, and provided them with the opportunity to exchange an interdisciplinary dialogue on CLIL methodologies, as well as the purely practical consequences of implementing such pedagogies in institutional educational practices at the primary, secondary or tertiary level. As such, collection embraces original contributions across a range of areas of CLIL. See more