Bilingual education and Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL): Research and its classroom implications

Abstract

The paper reviews the research findings from bilingual education and CLIL programs implemented in countries around the world. These findings show that bilingual programs promote strong academic skills in the target language at no cost to students’ proficiency in the dominant school language. The fact that less instructional time through the dominant societal language results in no negative effects on students’ academic development in that language suggests that cross-lingual transfer of concepts, learning strategies, and linguistic elements is occurring in bilingual and CLIL programs.  The paper argues that cross-lingual transfer can be enhanced when teachers explicitly teach for transfer across languages rather than keeping the two languages rigidly separate.