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CLIL: Combining Language and Content

Article in ESP Today · January 2017

DOI: 10.18485/esptoday.2017.5.2.9

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 BOOK REVIEW

CLIL: COMBINING LANGUAGE

AND CONTENT

Tarja Nikula, Emma Dafouz, Pat

Moore and Ute Smit (Eds.).
CONCEPTUALISING INTEGRATION IN CLIL
AND MULTILINGUAL EDUCATION (2016),
Bristol: Multilingual Matters. 276 pp., ISBN
978-1-78309-613-8 (PBK).
297

Some twenty-three years after the term was first coined by David Marsh and Anne
Maljers there is still much to be discussed concerning the implementation and
theoretical underpinnings of CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning).
The notion of CLIL was initially conceptualized in response to a political desire for
integration in a linguistically diverse Europe. From those initial, isolated, European
experiments at the level of compulsory schooling, CLIL has expanded into a
worldwide phenomenon spanning all levels of education.
One of the long-standing claims of the proponents of CLIL is that it focuses
equally on both content and language, and that like bilingual education it provides
excellent language-learning outcomes without negative effects on content learning
(see for example Willig, 1985). Indeed for the earlier stages of education to which
the term CLIL initially applied, there does seem to be some evidence that this “two-
for-the-price-of-one” claim holds water (although see also the critique by Bruton,
2013). However, the readers of ESP Today will probably be more interested in the
situation in tertiary education. Here, claims of language learning gains with no
effects on content learning do not seem to hold up. Met and Lorenz (1997) and
Duff (1997) have suggested that at higher levels of education limitations in a

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e-ISSN:2334-9050
JOHN AIREY

second language (L2) may inhibit students’ ability to explore abstract concepts.
They warn against the unreflected generalization of the positive effects of bilingual
education or CLIL beyond the system in which the research was carried out.
Indeed, a number of authors have documented quite substantial negative effects on
content learning when changing the teaching language from a first language (L1) to
an L2 in post-compulsory education (see for example Barton & Neville-Barton,
2003; Gerber, Engelbrecht, Harding, & Rogan, 2005; Klaassen, 2001; Marsh, Hau, &
Kong, 2000; Yip, Tsang, & Cheung, 2003).
Despite these negative findings, there are, of course, a number of important
pragmatic reasons for teaching tertiary level courses in an L2, such as the use of an
overseas lecturer or presence of international students. Thus, in my recent
overview for the Routledge Handbook of English for Academic Purposes (Airey,
2016) I suggest that the majority of courses taught in L2 in higher education
actually fall into the category of English Medium Instruction (EMI) rather than
CLIL, since language learning in such courses is often viewed as either a secondary
goal or incidental. There are also, of course, EAP courses with primarily linguistic
goals, but true CLIL is a form of bilingual education that places an equal emphasis
on both content and language-learning outcomes. This seems to be rare in higher
educational contexts. Consequently, of the nine chapters in the book, only one
deals with the university level, and here the authors of this chapter choose to talk
about multilingual settings rather than CLIL.
Actually, none of this really matters. As de Graaff points out in his foreword 298
to this volume, content cannot exist without language and language cannot exist
without content. In essence this means that all content teachers are language
teachers to some extent, even in monolingual settings (Airey, 2012). Clearly, the
ways in which the integration of content and language can be conceptualized and
implemented are just as relevant for higher education settings as they are for
compulsory schooling and the reader will thus find interesting and thought-
provoking material in every chapter of this volume.
As the title promises, the book discusses how we can conceptualize
integration of content and language in CLIL classrooms and is the final product of
an international research project ConCLIL (2011-2014) funded by the Academy of
Finland. After the foreword, the book proper opens with an introduction by Nikula,
Dalton-Puffer, Llinares and Lorenzo where they explain the reasoning behind the
original ConCLIL project and argue for a broad definition of the term integration. A
comprehensive literature review is presented around the issue of integration of
content and language and the division of the book into sections on Curriculum and
Pedagogy Planning, Participants and Practices is explained in terms of dealing with
the what, the who, and the how of CLIL.
In the first chapter, Dalton-Puffer introduces the construct of “Cognitive
Discourse Functions”. These are “verbal routines that have arisen in answer to
recurring demands” (p. 29) within disciplines. She identifies seven functions
(Classify, Define, Describe, Evaluate, Explain, Explore, Report) and argues that

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 BOOK REVIEW

these form a fundamental basis for transdisciplinarity. This is important work and
should be of interest to all teachers of ESP. Similarly the focus of the second
chapter by Lorenzo and Dalton-Puffer on the concept of historical literacy and its
problematization will be interesting not only for those working with history in one
way or another, but also for content and language specialists struggling with the
definition of disciplinary literacy in other fields. In the third chapter, Berger deals
with the integration of mathematics and language. In my opinion this is the most
convincing of the chapters, with the author presenting a particularly clear and
well-motivated model of the integration of mathematics and language. The section
on Curriculum and Pedagogy Planning is rounded off by Barwell, who uses a
number of constructs from Bakhtin in order to conceptualize integration in terms
of expansion of students’ language repertoires.
The volume then moves on to two chapters that examine the views of
Participants (in this case, teachers). One criticism here is that for completeness it
would have been interesting to have some input from students about their
experiences of combining content and language. In chapter five, Dafouz, Hüttner
and Smit study eighteen university lecturers’ beliefs about content and language
integration analyzing the data in terms of the ROAD-MAPPING framework (Dafouz
& Smit, 2014). This framework examines: the Roles of English (RO) in relation to
other languages, the Specialisation of Academic Disciplines (AD) in terms of their
traditions of teaching and assessment and discursive conventions, Language
Management (M) through policy documents and the like, Agents (A) i.e. the various 299
stakeholders in higher education, Practices and Processes (PP) and
Internationalisation and Glocalisation (ING). The selected quotes from the
lecturers make for fascinating reading. The same can be said about the next
chapter where a similar approach is taken by Skinnari and Bovellan in their
interviews with twelve secondary school teachers.
The final section of the book deals with Practices. In chapter seven, Morton
and Jakonen use conversation analysis to reveal how students work together to
discover the meaning of language items during classroom interactions that are
focused around content. This is particularly useful as it gives teachers an insight
into what is going on from a language-learning perspective in terms of the wide
range of resources brought into play when students work in small groups in CLIL
settings. Having demonstrated how students can spontaneously work together to
tease out the meaning of an incidental vocabulary item – in this case the unfamiliar
word “bruises” – the authors conclude their chapter by suggesting that it ought to
be possible to leverage student interactions of this type with respect to vocabulary
items of functional importance for the content area. Here the authors suggest more
tightly engineered designs using pre- and post-tests focused on content-based
tasks. In chapter eight Llinares and Nikula use Systemic Functional Linguistics
(SFL) and pragmatics to examine teacher and student use of evaluative language in
CLIL science and social science classrooms. Here the focus is not on the language
used to evaluate student performance in the areas of content or language, but

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JOHN AIREY

rather on the evaluation of content itself – that is, the authors are interested in the
language used by teachers and students to express judgments about content
knowledge. There are three types of evaluative language, “attitude” e.g. “It was
one-sided agreement”, “engagement” e.g. “I think the object must be influenced by
gravity”, and “graduation” e.g. “The size of the effect is quite small”. The authors’
interesting conclusion is that the types of evaluative language used differ both
geographically and by discipline.
Teachers in language classrooms often go to great lengths to avoid students
communicating in their L1. It was therefore particularly interesting to read Moore
and Nikula’s chapter about translanguaging – what might previously have been
termed “codeswitching” or “codemixing” – in CLIL classrooms. As the authors point
out, the majority of bilingual research has had a monolingual, L2 focus rather than
a multilingual focus – that is, it has encouraged students to use L2 rather than
encouraging the use of multilingual practices. The chapter studies the actual
language use in CLIL classrooms and concludes that translanguaging serves two
distinct purposes: in social interactions it is used to aid continuity, whilst in
content-oriented situations it is used to scaffold meaning negotiation. The twenty-
six examples given span three countries and six subject areas and all demonstrate
how students and teachers can move seamlessly back and forth between L1 and L2
in order to disambiguate disciplinary and other meanings.
In the concluding chapter Leung and Morton summarise each chapter’s
approach to language and learning. Using Bernstein’s notion of pedagogic 300
discourse they create a framework where each chapter’s approach to integration
in CLIL can be classified in terms of disciplinary orientation to language on the one
hand and visibility of language pedagogy on the other. Those chapters that had a
higher disciplinary orientation to language either strongly focus on subject
literacies (high visibility of language pedagogy) or more generally emphasize
language as a tool for participation in content tasks and disciplinary thinking (low
visibility of language pedagogy). Similarly, the chapters that described CLIL with a
lower disciplinary orientation to language could also be categorized in terms of
high or low visibility of language pedagogy. Here the chapters focused either on
explicit language knowledge (but not necessarily related to content) or on the CLIL
classroom as an arena for choice, creativity, and contingency. The authors point
out the tensions between these four very different focuses. They conclude that
trying to agree on one definition of integration of language and content may not be
a meaningful project as this may lead to certain aspects of integration being
emphasized over other important aspects.
CLIL was first proposed as a solution to a European language problem. This
original linguistic bias is still evident. In her survey of university-level research
into content and language integration, Jacobs (2015) reports that the
overwhelming majority of articles have been written by linguists. This language
focus continues. Of the sixteen authors involved in this volume only Barwell and
Berger can claim to be content specialists. At the same time, none of the authors

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 BOOK REVIEW

would have difficulties passing themselves off as linguists of one form or another.
In a volume on integration of content and language, one might have hoped for
more input from mainstream content specialists. This small issue aside, the range
of contributions in terms of geographical spread, educational level and type of
content is particularly well balanced. However, perhaps the most impressive
aspect of the volume is the diversity of well-developed theoretical and
methodological lenses employed. Although there is still much work to be done on
the integration of content and language, the field has come a long way in a short
period of time.
In conclusion I can warmly recommend Conceptualising Integration in CLIL
and Multilingual Education. The book will be of interest to linguists, teachers of ESP
and EAP, and CLIL practitioners.

[Review submitted 30 Jun 2017]

[Revised version received 17 Oct 2017]
[Accepted for publication 23 Oct 2017]

Reviewed by JOHN AIREY

Department of Mathematics and Science Education
Stockholm University
and
School of Languages 301
Linnæus University
Sweden
[email protected]

References

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Sweden. AILA Review, 25, 64-79.
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report of two studies. New Zealand Journal of Mathematics, 32(Supplementary
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 JOHN AIREY

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