DEVELOPING A PERFORMANCE TEST FOR ITALIAN CLIL TEACHER CERTIFICATION: EXAMINING CLIL TEACHER LANGUAGE

Abstract

As the provision of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL)
is moving increasingly into mainstream education, the call for certified
qualification of CLIL teachers is growing. A project is being developed
at the University of Venice to design a test to certify both the
L2 competence of CLIL teachers and their knowledge of CLIL methodology.
For the purposes of the pilot test, it will focus on the teaching
of science through English.
As CLIL is not easily understood as a construct, making the measurement
of ability complex, there are many directions for research within
this context, which include examining how the interplay of general
foreign language proficiency, subject-specific language, the language
of classroom interaction, and code-switching contribute to the construction
of CLIL science classroom discourse, in addition to the issue
of what minimum L2 language proficiency is required of the CLIL
teacher to effectively handle the methodology needed to implement
this approach. This paper will discuss the methods used to investigate
the target language use though the qualitative analysis of data from
several different sources. The methodological issues will be discussed
in a separate paper in this volume (cf. Serragiotto).