b) Language support

Put like this, it may seems as if the subject teacher has a lot to think about – even in one lesson – and that many of these problems are ones to which they may not have obvious answers. They may also quite properly presume that it is not their job to deal with all these problems: their language colleagues are better placed to do so – and we will return to this question below. The difficulty is that most of the biggest language problems have to be solved within this lesson, because if they are not, the learners will not learn the subject matter. So there is often no escape!

In fact what happens in CLIL lessons is that, as we mentioned above, teachers do teach and learners learn. In other words they solve these problems as they go along. Teachers gradually become skilled at anticipating language barriers and the process of planning lessons to overcome them becomes routine, rather than laboured. And they gradually accumulate the new strategies which they need for providing support. What are the main support strategies they use?

Support strategies for listening
To help learners listen, subject teachers highlight or explicitly teach vocabulary. At the text level they help learners to follow them by using visuals and by adjusting their talking style: they enumerate points, give examples, explain, summarise, more then they would in L1.

Support strategies for speaking
To help students talk in the plenary classroom, they adjust their questions (asking, perhaps, some cognitively demanding but short answer questions); they prompt (for example they start learners’ responses for them); they provide vocabulary, they may allow some L1 responses. To help them talk in groups, they provide support at the word level by listing key words to use; to help with making sentences they can offer supportive task types such as talking frames, sentence starters or substitution tables; or they ask students to use their L1 when discussing but their L2 when reporting.

Support strategies for reading
To help students with reading they may check that they understand key vocabulary before they read; they may provide them with pre-reading questions to reduce the reading demands of the text; or they may offer help at the text level by giving reading support tasks, such as a chart to fill in, a diagram to label, etc.

Support strategies for writing
To help them with writing, they can offer support at all three levels by providing a vocabulary list, sentence starters, or a writing frame. They can also ensure that the learners talk through their writing at the word, sentence and text level, with each other, probably in L1, before they write.

These strategies amount to a different pedagogy from L1-medium teaching. When you work in L1, you don’t often have to anticipate the language demands of lessons in this way; neither do you have to provide much of this kind of language support. CLIL has its own specific pattern of teaching and CLIL teachers have to learn it. It means acquiring a new set of language-supportive task types, developing a different quality of teacher-talk, using a variety of forms of interaction and knowing whether or when to encourage the learners’ to use L1. These strategies will be familiar to subject teachers who are experienced in working in L2. They often acquire many of them simply by working them out for themselves. But many do not, and if they get no training they may carry on struggling with some of these problems for longer than is necessary.

Lesson planning in CLIL

Lesson planning in CLIL programmes requires teachers to anticipate language problems and help learners solve them as they proceed through the lesson. Once you accept that you have to do it, it becomes easier. If you get training to help you do it, it becomes easier still. Finally, language teachers know – to an extent – how to do these things. They haven’t normally been trained to provide help in L2-medium subject lessons, but they have a lot of the skills which will help them solve these problems. It is useful for subject teachers to collaborate with them, especially when they start out teaching in L2, and to get early help with planning lessons. The more they can get at this initial stage, the easier it is, with time, to incorporate simple lesson-planning routines into normal CLIL practice and fairly quickly to work independently with confidence.