Clil as the Approach to the Future
- Submitted by: esateacher
- Views: 294
- Category: English
- Date Submitted: 11/28/2014 10:16 AM
- Pages: 7
- Report this Essay
Even in ancient civilizations languages were necessary as a means of establishing communication with people from different cultures. If we bear in mind that more than three thousand languages are spoken in the world nowadays, the learning a foreign languages becomes a crucial problem in our society.
Teachers in the 21st century have the challenge of adapting their teaching practice to our society’s needs and reality, and nowadays it is clear that the knowledge of foreign languages is a basic skill for everyone.
This brings up to the question of whether our model of education is adequate, but the analysis of the actual situations shows that it is not the case.
Spain is the third country in the European Union with the lowest number of adults aged 25-64 who declare being able to speak at least one foreign language. Only 51% from the whole population knows a foreign language, and it means a very low percentage if we compare it with the communitarian average (66%), according to a research published by Eusostat (2013).
In the search for new ways of teaching, there are many voices who claim that CLIL ( Content and Language Integrated Learning) seems to be the candidate likely to produce a paradigm shift in the world of language teaching (BALL, 2013)
The term CLIL was launched in 1994 by David Marshall, but its practice has been around a lot longer with its roots in immersion education from the 1970s and 1980s. Marshall defines CLIL approach with these words: “Content and language integrated learning (CLIL) refers to any dual-focused educational context in which an additional language, thus not usually the first language of the learners involved, is used as a medium in the teaching and learning of non-language content. It is dual-focused because whereas attention may be predominantly on either subject-specific content or language, both are always accommodated” (Marsh, 2002)
CLIL methodology offers a natural approach in which the student makes use of the foreign...
Teachers in the 21st century have the challenge of adapting their teaching practice to our society’s needs and reality, and nowadays it is clear that the knowledge of foreign languages is a basic skill for everyone.
This brings up to the question of whether our model of education is adequate, but the analysis of the actual situations shows that it is not the case.
Spain is the third country in the European Union with the lowest number of adults aged 25-64 who declare being able to speak at least one foreign language. Only 51% from the whole population knows a foreign language, and it means a very low percentage if we compare it with the communitarian average (66%), according to a research published by Eusostat (2013).
In the search for new ways of teaching, there are many voices who claim that CLIL ( Content and Language Integrated Learning) seems to be the candidate likely to produce a paradigm shift in the world of language teaching (BALL, 2013)
The term CLIL was launched in 1994 by David Marshall, but its practice has been around a lot longer with its roots in immersion education from the 1970s and 1980s. Marshall defines CLIL approach with these words: “Content and language integrated learning (CLIL) refers to any dual-focused educational context in which an additional language, thus not usually the first language of the learners involved, is used as a medium in the teaching and learning of non-language content. It is dual-focused because whereas attention may be predominantly on either subject-specific content or language, both are always accommodated” (Marsh, 2002)
CLIL methodology offers a natural approach in which the student makes use of the foreign...