CLIL across the Curriculum, benefits that go beyond the classroom

Abstract

There are many variables that must be considered when designing a curriculum, especially one that caters to language and content. A curriculum of this type helps prepare learners for real world issues. At present, many curricular programs are geared towards 21st-century skills (Deyrich & Stunnel, 2014; Görlach, 1999), but there are frequently questions about how these skills are integrated into the curriculum in such a way that importance is shared equally between content and language. Content in itself is often mistaken for subjects such as math, science, and geography but, in contrast, a language course is almost never considered content. This is because the entire educational sys- tem, not to mention that it is a systematic cultural view arising from the ideological values of modernism over the past several centuries, where the system separates the teaching and learning of language and content subjects when they should really be uniting them. Content can, after all, be defined as knowledge and/or skills that the learners would need to acquire even if they were not also learning the CLIL lan- guage (Coyle, Hood, & Marsh, 2010). In education, content is usually labeled as a “content area”, which UNESCO’s International Bureau of Education (2018) define as “topics, themes, beliefs, behaviors, concepts and facts, often grouped within each subject or learning area under knowledge, skills, values and attitudes, that are expected to be learned and form the basis of teaching and learning” (p. 1).