Characterising representative CLIL practices: An Andalusian case study

Abstract

The characterisation of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has recently come to the forefront and acquired a new significance. Both their conceptualisation and pedagogical implementation have of late started to be questioned and are considered as excessively vague and ambiguous, since CLIL is held to encompass too broad an array of possible programme alternatives, thus making its exact limits very difficult to pin down. Thus, we need to characterise representative CLIL practices and to know exactly what it looks like in practice. This chapter reports on the outcomes of two governmentally funded R&D projects (FFI2012-32221 and P12-HUM-2348), within which an observation protocol has been designed, validated, and applied in 53 public, private, and charter schools in 12 provinces belonging to Andalusia, the Canary Islands, and Extremadura. English as a Foreign Language and Non-Linguistic Area subjects taught in English with a CLIL methodology have been observed and the linguistic, methodological, and organisational traits of CLIL are here described with a representative sample in the provinces of Jaén and Granada vis-à-vis the seven main fields of interest which have been canvassed: foreign language use in class, discursive functions, competence development, methodology and types of groupings, materials and resources, coordination and organisation, and evaluation. The results allow us to paint a clearer picture of what CLIL looks like at the grassroots level and to thereby make headway in characterising representative pedagogical CLIL practices which will hopefully contribute to honing and fine-tuning its characterisation.