The Role of (Foreign) Language in Education

Abstract

CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) is an educational approach in which academic content is taught through a foreign language. Originally motivated for increasing foreign language exposure and learning, CLIL soon revealed itself to be much more. When teachers must teach complex mathematics or history concepts through a foreign language, they realise that students may not easily follow the lesson if they just explain (i.e. lecture).  This motivates CLIL-teachers to reduce teacher-centred lecturing and increase student-centred doing. CLIL-teachers thus evolve from being simply “talking textbooks” into “engineers of instruction”.