THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE IN THE CLIL LESSON: PROBLEMS AND IMPLICATIONS

Abstract

CLIL constitutes a new learning environment as well as a
new teaching environment. As such therefore it represents a new
research ‘space’ that can be investigated from a variety of
perspectives. In this paper the focus of the research is that of
language – the foreign language in the CLIL lesson. The reason
for focus lies in the promise that CLIL makes - namely that the
foreign language competence of the CLIL students will grow
through the learning of the content. Research by Swain and
colleagues (1985) has shown however that this is not an
automatic process, especially as far as concerns oral productive
competence.
The present paper focuses precisely on this aspect through
the quantitative and qualitative analysis of oral data collected in
CLIL lessons from five lessons in four Italian high schools.
Results show that greater care needs to be made in organizing
tasks in the CLIL lesson that are more conducive to richer oral
production on the part of the pupils.