Teaching and learning through english: classroom strategies and practices in CLIL

Abstract

The education system in the Basque Autonomous Community (BAC) is making efforts in moving from bilingualism to multilingualism by offering subjects taught through the foreign language, which is most of the times English. The aim of this study is to explore the way English-medium subjects are implemented in Secondary School in the BAC. More specifically, it describes how teachers integrate language and content in their classrooms, and how they manage to make content comprehensible when using English as the medium of instruction. It also seeks to investigate the presence of the students¿ and teachers¿ multilingual repertoire in CLIL lessons. For that, this study takes a qualitative approach. This is a multiple-case study where four classes taught through English are analyzed. Data was collected through classroom observations, semi-structured interviews with the four CLIL teachers and classroom documents. Findings show how different teachers¿ backgrounds have an effect on the implementation of these programs: the teachers who have a content-teaching background exclude themselves from the responsibility of ¿teaching¿ the foreign language and tend to focus on content-matter only while those with a language-teaching background show more language awareness and see themselves as language and content facilitators. These teachers also show more strategies to make content comprehensible, among others. Classroom realities also show the potential of translanguaging, used with a pedagogical purpose, in these CLIL settings.