Language form and language function in CLIL models 3301-JF2658

CLIL(content-and-language-integrated learning) refers to specific educational settings where a foreign (second) language is used as a medium of instruction instead of the students’ mother tongue. The twofold aim of CLIL-based teaching is to do justice to the inherent complexities of the content subject while attending to the linguistic needs of L2 learners.
The course examines the mechanisms that ensure the right kind of balance between the development of the basic communicative skills on the one hand and the establishment of the broadly conceived academic context on the other. A CLIL-conscious teacher will encourage overt reflections about L2 structure, L1 awareness raising activities, conscious L1:L2 comparisons, as well as inductive or deductive techniques for arriving at rule formulations of non-trivial predictive power. Does the integration of content-based and form-focused instruction lead to the growth of a sufficiently robust interlanguage system? To answer this question research results from numerous studies and surveys will be analysed.
The question of how much content vs. how much language to teach will be shown to parallel a well-known linguistic dichotomy: the formalist vs. the functionalist approach to the study of language. Some consequences of adopting this perspective for CLIL-driven instruction will also be explored.
Towards the end of the course students should be able to develop their own CLIL-related teaching materials.

ü Content-and-Language Integrated Learning: definitions, basic tenets
ü CLIL aims and objectives, learning outcomes
ü what is language in Content-and-Language Integrated Learning
ü lexicon, phraseology, grammar vs. CLIL routines
ü is language grammaticalised lexis or lexicalised grammar?
ü the language-culture-globalisation continuum from the CLIL perspective
ü processing and negotiating language through content
ü fluency -accuracy - communicative success and how to assess them in CLIL-based testing