Language Use and Language Learning in CLIL Classrooms (review)

The gaining momentum of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) programs, regarded by some as a revolution across the European educational landscape (Dafouz & Guerrini, 2009), has resulted in an increasing upsurge of CLIL research. Christiane Dalton-Puffer, Tarja Nikula, and Ute Smit’s Language Use and Language Learning in CLIL Classrooms is an attempt to link theory with practice, reviewing evidence in support of different CLIL-specific pedagogies. In the solid organization of this volume, the introduction and the conclusion bring together the rest of the chapters in a coherent and easy-to-follow fashion. The chapters of the body are organized in three sections. The first two sections deal with secondary level programs and the last one focuses on tertiary education.

The introductory chapter offers a clear definition of CLIL followed by an overview of the CLIL landscape in Europe and the underlying assumptions behind the range of CLIL programs now in existence. In chapter 2, Francisco Lorenzo and Pat Moore examine second-year, secondary spontaneous second language (L2) written production to argue for a notional syllabus to frame the relationship between form and meaning. Naturally occurring classroom interaction is studied in chapter 3, where Didier Maillat presents ways in which CLIL learning environments might provide the conditions to overcome students’ communicative limitations as a result of the stress of L2 learning.

The second part of this volume, focused on studies at the secondary level, begins with Julia Hüttner and Angelika Rieder-Bünemann’s exploration of oral narratives to report findings that suggest that CLIL-type approaches improve learners’ oral narrative abilities. Tom Morton, for instance, analyzes an example of a history class task to present the benefits of using a genre-based approach to integrate content and language. In addition, his proposal aims to find a place for the critical analysis of the construction of knowledge to develop the required intercultural competence in CLIL (Coyle, Hood, & Marsh, 2010). In the following contribution, Tarja Nikula focuses on teacher language use in a biology lesson to draw a comparison between L1 and L2. The limitations found in L2 teaching – absence of humour, reduced ability to express thoughts, feeling of being ‘distant’ from students – support suggestions for specific CLIL training in teacher education programs. Next, Ana Llinares and Rachel Whittaker use the study of CLIL learners’ written performance from a subject-specific genre approach to argue for explicit training for teachers to become skilled at scaffolding the process of deconstructing and constructing the subject genre. Focusing on aspects of grammatical metaphor, Heini-Marja Järvinen presents academic writing genres as a resource for creating meaning in subject-matter literacy. The results of Silvia Jexenflicker and Christiane Dalton-Puffer’s study of L1/L2 written performance, in which the differences between schools are greater than those between CLIL/non-CLIL, call for teaching subject-specific genre in both L1 and L2. Lastly, Yolanda de Zarobe presents a carefully designed longitudinal study to provide evidence of a positive relationship between the amount of content-based instruction and the quality of the learner’s written production.

In the third part of this volume, devoted to tertiary level education, Emma Dafouz Milne and Begoña Núñez Perucha compare instructors’ performance while lecturing in L1 and L2 to report important differences and recommend that university instructors receive training in lecturing to an L2 student audience. The following contribution, by Glenn Ole Hallekajær, also suggests training lecturers in L1 and outlines aspects that cause students to have difficulties in understanding lectures, such as level of pronunciation, word segmentation, discourse structure, and visual aids. In the last chapter in this section, Ute Smit presents a longitudinal study that uses discourse analysis to argue for the existence and benefits of interactive explaining in CLIL environments where English acts as lingua franca.

The concluding chapter emphasizes the contributions presented in this volume and examines concerns such as the...