Successful CLIL depends on a variety of factors.

This paper discusses

four factors relevant to successful implementation of CLIL. Firstly, we
will look at questions of managing and supporting the CLIL
implementation process. Secondly, we will look at the roles and
behaviours of teachers in the delivery of CLIL. Thirdly, we will
examine the issue of resourcing CLIL in schools. Lastly, but by no
means least importantly, we will consider factors to do with the
learners in CLIL education.

1. Management factors

CLIL, like any other current educational reform, can be a victim of the whims of
political parties and ministries of education and the time frames within which
they work. Moving from teaching a national curriculum area in the mother
tongue to a foreign language should not be undertaken lightly.

Cummins (2000) states that it can take anything up to 7 years for minority
language speakers receiving their education through a majority language to
reach the academic language level of their majority language speaking peers.
Cummins, it should be added, is describing minority language speakers living
and learning within a language majority community, for example Hispanics in
California for whom English is a second language. This means that the
environment within which this community is living and learning is by and large
the community of the majority language speakers.

CLIL learners, on the other hand, tend to be monolingual groups (or bilingual
groups within a bilingual community) learning through English as a foreign
language. The environment in which the CLIL group lives and learns is not an
English language speaking community. If they are lucky, the school
environment will be an English-medium one, but even this is not common.

Time scales which are based on anything shorter than 7 years, then, take risks
in the provision of the language development necessary for minority groups to
have a good chance at schooling. Indeed, assuming an implementation process
incorporates the years 1 to 12 of an average school life of a child, and we
imagine that an implementation process will develop as the child goes through
school, the CLIL curriculum is hardly likely to halt after Cummins 7 years of
developing academic language and will continue till graduation.

In short we are looking at a CLIL curriculum which spans the entire age and
content range of 12 years, roughly 2 to 3 terms of office for any sitting
governmental ministry of education. Add to this the need to review and develop
the curriculum to improve provision, it is quite likely that a fluid working model
of CLIL in schools, to take at least one or two extra years, probably more for a
review of each curriculum year to work its way through to year 12. So, were
talking about 15 years and 3 to 4 terms of office just to have a whole-school
workable model in place which has been tested and updated.

Having described the picture above to set the scene, Id like you now to
suspend this reality for a while and think of the four variables (management,
teachers, resources, learners) as independent items which we can scale in
terms of more or less favourable for CLIL. This is impossible to do in reality of
course, hence the suspension of reality which Im asking you to commit to. The
reality is that (deep intake of breath here) if you have a brilliant and driven
subject teacher with good English, with time to prepare, probably single and no
children, and young enough to have the energy to work late into the night,
working with talented learners at school, resourced well and with curriculum
and time freedom to experiment, moving on with a class from year to year,
paid enough not to get demotivated too soon (take a breath), then CLIL has a
chance when the other variables are missing or measure low on our scale. As I
said, suspend your idea of reality for me for a moment.

Government aims and support

In recent years, its been quite common to find governments with motivation
for CLIL. Its less common to find motivated governments who think seriously
in the longer term about CLIL implementation and all that entails, though there
are some significant exceptions.

The Austrian government, for example, has recently passed legislation which
obliges Higher Technical Schools to offer 72 hours of their year 3 curriculum
through the medium of English for all students in year 3. The plan is for this
cohort to go on receiving English-medium education thereafter from year to
year.

At the same time as introducing this legislation the government has been
funding in-service training programmes in CLIL for practising teachers. The
programme comprises 12 full days of training over a period of 18 months. At
the University of Education in Vienna at the time of writing, 7 groups and over
200 teachers have already undergone the programme of CLIL training over the
past 4 years.

Additionally, the schools have identified senior staff to be responsible for the
CLIL initiative, a group of these senior teachers has got together to write
guidelines for other schools beginning to implement CLIL and they have set up
a national portal (accessed 05.02.14) for CLIL to gather information and
resources to share among CLIL in HTLs nationally.

There is also a national electronic network growing which now has over 150
CILL teachers in it and supports their communication about their work.
 The Austrian CLIL project is hosting its first national CLIL conference in April
2014 at the University of Education in Vienna to bring together those
experienced in and those who are newcomers to CLIL to develop the network
further. All of the ingredients above are strategic factors in the success of the
Austrian HTL CLIL project, and we havent even started to look at the question
of teachers, resources, or learners.

A whole-school policy

A major challenge to management of a CLIL initiative is creating a whole-

school ownership of the CLIL project. Language teachers can feel that CLIL
threatens their role in the school. Subject teachers can feel anxious about their
language abilities. Parents can worry about content achievement in a foreign
language.

Its important right from the start that school managers work to bringing
everyone together, creating one voice for CLIL. In practice this can be as
simple as making sure everyone is aware of what the aims and objectives are.

What does CLIL hope to achieve?

If a school is teaching through English as a foreign language, what effect is this
having on content grades?

There is research which suggests (Genessee 2006, Dobson, Perez Murillo,

Johnstone 2010, Jaeppinen 2005) that CLIL / immersion students do not
achieve less well in terms of content than their monolingual counterparts. It is
important that everyone knows this and that they are able to air their concerns
and have them heard and responded to in an informed manner. Schools should
be encouraged to carry out their own investigations into student achievement
during CLIL courses and publish their findings.

Time

Are managers and department heads working to provide time in the curriculum
for their CLIL teacher colleagues? Teachers in CLIL need time to prepare. Let
me say this once again. CLIL teachers need extra time to prepare. Managers
need to make the curriculum fit with this need for time (see Teacher
Collaboration).

Clearly, then, the management factor is important. All of the top-down factors
are instrumental in supporting bottom-up initiatives from teachers and the
classroom. But, it is no good on its own. For CLIL to work, there also needs to
be success in the three factors to come: teachers, resources, learners.

2. Teacher factors

What is the ideal CLIL teacher? Lets deal with the native speaker question first.
Its a myth that native speakers make better CLIL teachers than non-native
speakers. A British (American, Australian, Canadian, or other) accent is a
quaint educational aim, but shouldnt be a factor in teacher selection. In many
ways native speakers have challenges to teaching CLIL which non-native
speakers do not. In most CLIL classrooms the teacher speaks the same mother
tongue language as the children. This can be a huge advantage and it can be
an equally large disadvantage if the teacher doesnt know the language the
children speak at home.

Strategic use of the mother tongue should be encouraged in the CLIL classroom
if it supports learners in developing the foreign language. Whatever the
background of the teacher, they need to be able to moderate their language so
that it is at the right input level for the learners they work with. A native
speaker speaking at full speed, using colloquialisms, slang, and cultural
referencing can cause a lot of difficulties for CLIL learners.

Minimum level of teacher language

Some countries do have benchmarks for the level of language of teachers

working through the medium of a foreign language.

Perhaps at the top of the pile is Holland, where schools looking for accreditation
as a bilingual school, need to be visited, inspected, and tested before they are
given official bilingual status. Teachers are expected to reach Cambridge
Proficiency level in the English language. This is high, but, well, thats the
Dutch, isnt it.

What about the rest of us? I would advocate a level of foreign language which
is functionally adequate for working in the subject in the classroom. Subject
teachers arent expected to be language teachers, they are expected to teach
their subject through English and use strategies for supporting learners working
in English. This is somewhere between B1 (also recently identified as the
minimum language requirement by the Home Office for settlement in the UK!)
and B2, in my opinion. If youre a CLIL teacher, you should be able to do
everything you ask the students to do in your subject in English as a foreign
language. If you feel that you arent able to do this, join a class, improve your
English.

Some British Council offices in the past have been involved in teaching teachers
English in order to equip them with the language they need to teach through
the English language. Qatar is one example of a system which has had targeted
language training, as well as CLIL methodology training for teachers being
asked to work through English. I visited the Didzdvario Gymnasium
(www.dg.su.lt) in Latvia Siauliai in 2006 where the language teachers taught
the subject teachers English in order to get them to this functioning level of
English for CLIL. The school had just begun to implement the IB programme
through the English language. In other contexts, language teachers, or native
speaker assistants work hand-in-hand with local subject teachers and provide a
language focus to the otherwise mother-tongue lesson.

Teacher preparation and classroom methodology

As important as the question of level of language, if you ask me, is the question
of what methodology is being used in the classroom. In short CLIL classroom
methodology needs to be communicative, making use of a lot of visuals to
embed the content in a form that learners can easily understand, it needs to
have learners collaborating as much as possible, it needs to be challenging
cognitively, it also needs to be sequenced in a way that moves learners from a
cognitively less demanding and context-embedded position, through personal
talk over the ideas, on to more cognitively challenging, less context-embedded
public talk, and then on to writing.

It goes without saying that any CLIL teacher training needs to follow these
principles. I have many conversations with teachers who attend my training
sessions along the lines of:

T: I thought Id be getting help with Chemistry (insert any subject you like
here) content in English.

K: No, Im sorry, you wont get any specialist help with your subject. What you
will get is an awareness of the language of your subject, and ideas for things
you can do to help students access and use that language.

T: Oh.

Specialist subject teachers, by and large are already specialists in their

subjects, they dont need a refresher course, or if they do, they should find
one, not necessarily attend a CLIL course for subject refreshment. What subject
teachers working in CLIL do need, and need a lot of, is an awareness of how
language works in their subject, that is what the language of their subject is,
and how it behaves. They also need a repertoire of activities and techniques for
helping students develop the language they need to perform in their subject in
English. Any training should be crammed full of this stuff.

Teacher collaboration

In some ways teacher collaboration depends on management decisions, school

management making time available for teachers to collaborate. If a department
head is given the role of coordinating CLIL in the subject, this goes some way
to promoting collaboration among subject teachers more generally.

Equally important, but more of a question of language, is the question of

subject teacher and language teacher collaboration. In some settings where
there are no subject teachers with the level of language needed to teach
through English, some schools have both a language teacher and a subject
teacher working together.

As mentioned above, some schools are fortunate to have visiting teacher

assistants from English-speaking countries. These teacher assistants can be a
real treasure for non-native subject teachers working through English for
offering another model of the language, for in-class small group work and
others.

On a broader scale teachers should be encouraged to collaborate beyond the

school. There are plenty of teacher organizations and networks for CLIL
teachers to join. If there is a subject teacher organization in the country where
a teacher is working it goes without saying that it is valuable to get involved in
this organization, to join a community of like-minded teachers, to share, to
build a common voice. There may not be one of these organizations, but there
are international associations of teachers of CLIL. The Forum for Across the
Curriculum Teaching (FACTWorld) is one such network. At the time of writing,
FACTWorld has over 3500 teachers around the world in its network, teachers
who are all interested in CLIL. Colleagues need to get involved in these
networks, if for nothing else, to avoid reinventing the wheel every time they
prepare a new lesson in English!

3 Resource factors

While the European Union is advocating education for mobility, employability

and growth, which by default suggests education based on competences, we
live in a world where young people are still delivered facts to consume, where
much of learning is passive, where teachers talk and learners listen. (Please
bear with me, Im deliberately trying to be provocative!)

What is the state of education in your country? How often to do learners

discuss in groups in order to solve a problem, for example?

Educational literature today is full of appeals for learners to be given the

opportunity to collaborate, to critically think over questions in groups, and I
have to say here that this kind of student-focused perspective on learning, is
essential for CLIL. If we want learners to be able to speak in English, we have
to create opportunity for them to practise speaking in English.

The curriculum

Is your learners curriculum densely packed with factual abstract knowledge?

Or, does it have learning skills and thinking skills explicitly listed, exemplified
and accompanied with activity types for teachers to use as models for work in
their own classrooms?

A CLIL curriculum needs to have this and go a step further. It needs to include
samples of language that skills and thinking demand of learners, so that
teachers can both make sure that these functions of language are practised but
also so that teachers can listen out for them and moderate teaching to make
sure any difficulties and gaps are remedied in later learning. See Macmillans
Your CLIL for a collection of functions for Science and Geography, the language
that goes with these functions, and accompanying lessons.

Teaching resources

What CLIL resources do you have available to you?

In the vast majority of contexts Ive worked and visited, schools import native
speaker textbooks, usually British or from the US. While the quality can usually
be guaranteed with these books, they are always going to be a challenge for
CLIL learners on a number of levels.

The language demands of native speaker textbooks will be very high, not just
the subject-specific language, but also the general academic language, the
hidden language of learning. This invariably means that for CLIL classes with
imported books to be effective, the teacher will need to do a lot of adaptation,
which itself is very time and energy consuming.

Even with adaptation, there may still be culture specificity in the books which
causes extra challenges to local learners of content in English. Some contexts
prefer to translate local textbooks and while this can avoid the culture
challenges and linguistic problems of native speaker books, translation carries
challenges of its own.

Translated textbooks may still be linguistically at too high a level for learners
as, unless the language is moderated down to reach the learners level, it will
have language which is sophisticated in the native language, but simply
expressed in English as a foreign language. Translated textbooks can also
exhibit other problems, they can be produced without any pictures or
illustrations, presenting, quite literally, a textbook which is a book of text.
Translated textbooks can also lack one other major element activity! CLIL
textbooks need to be written around a skills-based curriculum. These skills will
involve practice in all areas of language, listening, speaking, reading and
writing. They will also need to be highly dynamic in activity demanding that
learners be involved in individual, pair, small group, and large group activity, as
well as presentation work amongst many, many other things. Some fortunate
contexts have resources which are custom-made for CLIL.

The Ikastolas network of schools in the Basque country, for example, have
invested heavily in publishing not only English-medium content textbooks which
are written specifically to meet the language and activity needs of Basque
learners, but they also produced and published English language textbooks for
courses to be taught alongside the content classes, which provide learners with
a deeper understanding of the language they meet in the content lessons,
practice the general academic language from these classes, and practice cross-
curricular skills needed for surviving and thriving in an educational environment
in a language other than the home language/s. Few countries are lucky enough
to have such resources, nevertheless, it does provide us with a benchmark, a
standard by which to work and to aim towards.

The lesson is simply this: CLIL is easier and more effective if you have custom-
made resources and can be much harder and less effective without them.

4 Learner factors

Last but not least, we come to the learners in our discussion of the ingredients
of successful CLIL. If the conditions are as good as they can be, all learners are
able to achieve their best. I certainly do not believe that there are some
learners suited better than others to CLIL. CLIL is valid for all types of learners
and should not be the domain of the selected elite. Sadly, the reality of the
situation in most contexts is that CLIL is the domain of the educational elite.

There are signs that this is beginning to change by force of demand and
population size. Holland has recently announced moves to bring its bilingual
system down into the primary sector. Certainly, the Kazakh ambition of
achieving trilingualism will eventually, we assume, include all learners in the
country beyond the Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools. The foreign language
medium grammar schools of Bulgaria with their model of preparatory class
followed by the curriculum in the foreign language of choice, is being copied by
other less prestigious schools in Bulgaria. The Italian governments recently
decided to implementing legislation which will spread the English language as a
medium. Countries need to set up conditions so that CLIL can be available to all
learners, not just the elite.

What then is the ideal number of hours per week? How long is a piece of string?

After the 18 hours of English per week in the prep class, Bulgarian teenagers
then go on to study 1 or 2 hours per week of other subjects (Geography,
History, Sciences) through English in the second year as well as continuing
English language classes, 6 classes per week.

The Austrian HTL project demands a minimum of 72 hours over one school
year, which could be two lessons per week. Austrian schools though have the
freedom to batch classes together and give learners a more intensive
experience with 6 or more classes per week for 12 weeks. And, of course, there
is nothing to stop HTLs from teaching more than 72 hours in the year.

What we do know is that more is better. However many hours students get,
learners need to have continuity, of both language and content and that this is
planned carefully so that concepts are contextually embedded and language is
sequenced and recycled. The curriculum needs also to be coordinated so that
what a History teacher is doing complements what the Maths teacher is doing,
and what the English language teacher is doing. If these ingredients are in
place, the learner factor can achieve its best in CLIL.

By Keith Kelly