Five top tips for a new

CLIL teacher
CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) is up and coming in most European countries these
days and is thought to bring about linguistic and cognitive benefits for children. It is thought not only to
increase pupils’ linguistic competence in the target language and make them flexible thinkers but also
to be a vehicle for pedagogical change in the classroom from the teacher’s point of view. Below, I lay
out 5 tips to bear in mind for any teacher who is willing to start using CLIL or for those who are already
“CLILers’:

Enthusiasm
If you want to start using CLIL, you have to be innovative to some extent. Being a CLIL teacher does
require preparation, but you also have to be ready to thrown in the deep end when you start. A bit of
enthusiasm will help to see you through the initial choppy waters!

New roles
CLIL implies a sweeping change regarding the way we approach foreign language lessons and subject
lessons. On the one hand, subject teachers, who have been dealing with their specialist area in their
mother tongue up to now, have to brush up on their English when planning a lesson and be aware of
the linguistic demands it places on them.

Language teachers have to bear in mind that they will not be merely teaching language any more but
will become a subject teacher too. The objectives of a lesson will therefore need to be conceptual as
well as linguistic so that teachers can measure to what extent pupils have learnt the subject content they
were aiming to teach.

In addition to these extra separate areas of responsibility for subject teachers and language teachers,
language teachers might be asked to support and give feedback to the subject teachers.

And subject teachers might be asked to do the same for language teachers. In short, they may be well
be required to work together and monitor each other.

Collegiality
It is thus absolutely vital for subject and language teachers to work together closely. They will need
regular meetings to confer on lesson planning to talk about assessment, and to share resources and
ideas.

Language teachers and subject teachers can also collaborate to develop projects combining one or two
subjects from those departments and English from the language department. This can lead to an
integrated curriculum.

Broaden your own outlook

CLIL teachers have to pay attention to both language and content in their lessons in order to help
learners learn both content and language simultaneously. Consequently, they may need to introduce
some methodological changes in order to make learning more memorable. For instance, CLIL teachers
might use the Total Physical Response Approach to Second Language Learning developed by James
J. Asher when explaining photosynthesis. Pupils can act out the roles of Light, Chlorophyll and so on
while he teacher calls out the process. This would make the topic considerably more memorable for
children.

Furthermore, CLIL teachers can try to build relationships with other schools in Europe through, for
example, etwinning or via Erasmus +. This will allow them to share pupils’ work and help their students
to communicate with other European or international students and increase their sociocultural
awareness.
So, moving into CLIL can encourage a teacher to widen their horizons both methodologically and in
terms of communicating beyond their own classroom and their own school.

Entrepreneurship
As pupils in a CLIL setting may significantly increase their level of proficiency in the foreign language,
CLIL can be a real impulse to come up with projects with other European schools and to set up activities
where pupils have the chance to communicate with children from other cultures by, for example, pen
pal exchanges and videoconferencing. Teachers might also be encouraged to allow their pupils to sit
external exams such as Cambridge or Trinity College language tests.

It can be a good idea too to get a class or school blog up and running to share resources.

Moving into CLIL work can thus afford the teacher chances, once they have adjusted to the challenges
of this new kind of work, to branch out and respond creatively to their new situation.

“Five top tips for a new CLIL teacher” by Enrique Ruiz Cano in The Teacher Trainer. Volume 30, No. 2,
2016.