Another reason not to jump on the CLIL bandwagon?
Sunday, June 14th, 2009“in 1999 a…study by Dr. Allan Bernardo of De La Salle University investigated the effects of different learner and instructional factors on solving arithmetic word problems among grade school students. The results showed better comprehension and solution performance when the tests were in the learners’ L1 in spite of being taught in English”
From an interesting article discussing English medium education in the Phillipines and Malaysia, Intellectualizing a Language. Obviously, English medium education is not the same as CLIL and I am of course guilty of looking for any evidence to back up my already made up mind of CLIL, but that’s humans for you…
As someone trying to teach a grammar-based textbook with 8 year olds, I totally appreciate efforts to make teaching young learners more content based. The problem with CLIL is the stated or unstated idea that you can get two for the price of one- learn Biology in a CLIL lesson, get English free! You can’t increase learning by 100% whatever approach you use, and certainly not by trying to teach two subjects at once with undertrained teachers as the reality of CLIL will turn out to be round most of the world. Try telling that to education ministries though…
If you want to find out more about CLIL than I’ve given you here (and you could hardly learn less, seeing as it is an information free rant), you can probably find out more than I will ever know on the subject here:
CLIL debate articles from Guardian
OnestopCLIL (mostly have to pay to see it, but some free and good guide to where CLIL is now)