CLIL pedagogy in Europe: CLIL teacher education in Germany

1 IntroductionCLIL, EMILE, and Bili are just three of the most common abbreviations for the concept that this article is trying to describe and explore on a European level with specialized focus on Germany. The English term CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), the French term EMILE (Enseignement d'une Matiere par TIntegration d'une Langue Etrangere) and the German abbreviation Bili (Bilingualer Unterricht = BU) usually evoke various ideas and attitudes in the readers' minds because these concepts have been present in the discussions of educationists, in teacher training and in school systems in Europe.First of all, it is important to stress the fact that the term is commonly used for children who have been raised bilingually. As far as teaching is concerned, it is widely used in Canada and the US and deals with questions of integration into a monolingual (USA) or bilingual culture (Canada) by learning a second language (L2) (Muller-Hartmann and Schocker-von-Ditfurth, 2004: 151). In Germany and in most parts of Europe however, the term bilingual does not refer to the mastery of a second language at native-like proficiency but it describes a partial foreign language competence {segmenteile Fremdsprachenkompetenz)1 (Kollenrott, 2008: 20). BU therefore defines a way of teaching in which subject matters are mainly taught in a foreign language (Bach, 2010: 15). We will go into more details of definition under 2.1.Generally, the concept of CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), which is the most used term for bilingual education in Europe, is perceived as innovative, successful and helpful for the development of multilingualism and cultural awareness, deeper intercultural competence, and critical thinking. For the last two decades, researchers have been pointing out a wide range of advantages of bilingual education in schools such as more intense language learning, especially in concern to technical terms in subject instruction, an awareness for the relevance of a lingua franca in science and research, better preparation for (international) careers in the globalized world, deeper knowledge about partner countries and their language and finally a stronger awareness for different perspectives leading to intercultural competence. Thus, students are trained as intercultural mediators (KMK 2006:11/Wolff, 2010: 153-154) and enabled for participation in international scientific discourses. (Hallet, 2005: 4, Kollenrott, 2008: 20, Mentz, 2010: 29, KMK, 2006: 10; Wolff, 2007: 22)From what we know about content subject learning in a foreign language, we can conclude that learners learn faster and are more motivated than in traditional content subject classrooms. CLIL learners are, in general, better content learners. They process content more deeply in the foreign language than in their other tongue and construct complex concepts and schemata. (Wolff, 2007: 16-22) Large empirical studies such as the longitudinal study by Winfried Bredenbroker (2000) in the German Land Lower Saxony were able to prove that students that were taught in bilingual classes had considerably higher and more homogenous (as far as the class as a whole is concerned) progress in language learning, especially regarding reading skills. In 2006, the DESI-Studie2 also demonstrated the above-mentioned advantages of bilingual education for the acquisition of a foreign language by using parallel control groups.However, these positive effects are not necessarily the result of criteria inherent to CLIL. It is essential to be extremely careful when it comes to the results of qualitative as well as quantitative research on CLIL. To give an idea of why data should be read with a critical eye on the background of the study, we would like to provide just one short example from a German perspective: Bilingual streams have been implemented in the late 1960s at the so-called Gymnasium, which is an elite type of school preparing students for university. …

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