The C of Cognition in CLIL Teacher Education: Some Insights from Classroom-Based Research

Abstract

This chapter aims at describing real foreign language (FL) teaching practices in state bilingual schools in the Region of Madrid (Spain) through the lens of the teachers involved in Content and Language Integrated Language (CLIL) settings. More specifically, our objective is to map the variety of pedagogical tasks proposed in the CLIL classroom to promote critical thinking skills around the comprehension of a given content. The source of these data is 71 experienced FL primary teachers working in the Madrid bilingual programme. The area of Madrid is considered here as an illustrative example of other monolingual regions of Spain, where some primary school subjects such Natural and Social Sciences, Arts & Crafts and Physical Education have been taught in English for more than 10 years now. Findings highlight that the most frequent CLIL reported practices in primary are designed to review and activate prior knowledge before the comprehension process of a given text, followed by a series of tasks aimed at working on low order thinking skills mainly. These results partially confirm certain dissension with the academia about the real implementation of CLIL in the primary classroom and suggest the need for a thorough discussion about good practices and routines in CLIL and their application in ESP teacher training.