Processing Science through Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL). A Teacher’s Practicum.

This paper presents a professional teacher development model that applies to the field of content based instruction as implemented in Italy. Its recipients are Italian upper secondary school science teachers involved in teaching a non-language subject in English, which is a foreign language for the teachers as well as for their students. Although the language of instruction is not spoken as a second language in Italy, the authors believe that this model, due to the added challenge of working with foreign language students who need to improve their language proficiency and conceptual understanding, will provide useful insight into scaffolding techniques and accessibility processes that can be exploited by practitioners working in second language acquisition environments. What is challenging about our model is its situational context. As mentioned above, Italy, according to Kachru’s Concentric Circles classification of English speaking countries, is placed within the Expanding Circle countries, which basically means that English is a language of instruction rather than a language of acquisition and plays no historical or governmental role, but it is nevertheless widely used as a foreign language or lingua franca (Kachru, 1985). Although technology has greatly modified the extent to which English is encountered outside of the classroom walls, it is still true that practicing it in daily situations is still quite difficult. In addition, as the demands of globalization ad internationalization processes grow stronger, more and more learners are faced with studying the language for different purposes, such as English for Science education which is the focus of this study. Learners are thus asked to focus on the ‘kind’ of English they actually need to know and for what purpose in order to be able to communicate professionally and/or academically in the workplace or study environment. It follows that teachers also need to be equipped to teach the language from different methodological angles and linguistic stances. They, alongside their students, need to move more flexibly among a blend of English instructional approaches and be able to select the most suitable according to needs and requirements. In Italy, the three main approaches that are most commonly present in the language teaching and learning arena are General English (GE) or English as a Foreign Language (EFL), English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL). Whereas the first two approaches have dominated language education in Italy for the past 60 years, CLIL has only recently made its official appearance in Italian school curricula (2010), but has revolutionized language-driven instruction. CLIL methodology (Marsh, 2011) offers an ecological framework that facilitates purposeful learning, which means, according to Anderson (1993), that when students are exposed to meaningful information such as subject content, and when they are provided with opportunities to use this information, their learning is cognitively more complex and challenging. Thus, the recall of the information itself is also facilitated. The recognition of CLIL on the part of the authors as a comprehensive approach, which not only includes areas of ESP and GE instruction, but combines the presentation of specific content and reinforces it through the use of the foreign language, is also a consequence of Anderson’s view. It is important to specify once again that although CLIL is a CBI methodology, it tackles instruction from the standpoint of the ‘foreignness’ of the language of study.