Download Russell Cross Interview - An Introduction to CLIL

Introduction to CLIL
Dr Russell Cross leads the teaching and research programs in bilingual education and content and language
integrated learning at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne. His
work focuses on the social, cultural, and political nature of language teachers’ work and knowledge.
What CLIL offers
“…even if you're not passionate about syntax and lexis, you can be excited by natural disasters, you can be
excited by seeing science experiments that work, you can be invigorated by going out on a sporting field
and learning how to play something…”
The real promise of CLIL is its capacity to capture the kids who aren’t going to be automatically switched
on by the idea of learning vocab and grammar, and the truth is, that's probably a lot of the students who
start off in a core compulsory classroom, and why we have so many students not make it through to the
senior years of schooling. CLIL rethinks what it means to be a language learner, it gets the teachers and
the learners to rethink what it means to be someone using language and, even if you're not passionate
about syntax and lexis, you can be excited by natural disasters, you can be excited by seeing science
experiments that work, you can be invigorated by going out on a sporting field and learning how to play
something, or a new sporting skill that you've never done before, and it just happens to be in another
language.
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The opportunities this affords a language user who isn’t otherwise going to be engaged with
maybe writing down characters and learning grammar, is something that we haven't been able to access
before, and CLIL makes that possible. CLIL enables language teachers to reach out to a whole group of
students that they might have otherwise missed if they just continue to focus on teaching what is
essentially just vocab and grammar. There's new opportunities around science, history, geography, music,
sports, that the language teacher can think about the role that language plays in each of those areas to
bring those kids into the language classroom and make them great language users, which is ultimately
what language development should be about, not just memorising words and grammar.
The CLIL /Immersion confusion
“…although immersion has been incredibly successful, CLIL takes what works but reconfigures this in a way
that makes the same opportunities accessible to teachers and students without having to have a wholeschool buy-in.”
"Immersion" is a term that frequently appears when we're talking about programmes like this that are
centred on the relationship between language and the curriculum, but the difference is that immersion is
normally what we'd refer to in the Canadian context where a whole school has made a whole-school
commitment to staffing, curriculum, timetabling and the organisation of everything, really, that happens
within the school around language. And to even be considered immersion in the international context, it
needs to be at least 50% delivered through the target language. CLIL recognises that that is actually very
difficult to do and, although immersion has been incredibly successful, CLIL takes what works but
reconfigures this in a way that makes the same opportunities accessible to teachers and students without
having to have a whole-school buy-in.
And so what CLIL has been able to do, building on immersion, is to work out what are the core principles
that matter for making genuine bilingual learning experiences happen within and across the curriculum in
different ways without the whole school having to configure itself to make that happen. So it's important
to realise that CLIL offers opportunities that immersion can’t offer for teachers who are thinking about
how they might make an integrated learning experience possible for their students, without necessarily
having to depend on everyone else in the school to make that happen.
The pedagogy
CLIL is best thought of as a pedagogy, which means that it's a way of teaching rather than a way of
describing a program.
Now, that means that any teacher who is teaching can apply those principles, and that's an important
thing to realise because it means that any teacher can make decisions about using the four Cs in the
© 2015 Education Services Australia Ltd, unless otherwise indicated. Provided acknowledgements are retained, Education Users may use, reproduce and communicate
this material free of charge for non-commercial educational purposes until 30 June 2018, unless otherwise indicated.
language triptych to rethink their own relationship with their students and what that might mean
for a three-week unit of work through to a full semester's unit of work. The key thing is how they are
thinking about what teaching and learning means between them and their students, not what the wholeschool program has to look like.
An exemplar
“…that is the power of CLIL: that it can start off very small, it can start off with a very clearly, well-defined
unit, and it can start off with one teacher building up a programme that others see is a quality program.”
One of the exemplars that we've seen of CLIL in the local Australian context is probably the Gladstone Park
Secondary programme. I refer to it as a programme because now it is whole-school orientation to thinking
about where CLIL might sit within the school from year seven right through to ten, and it's had an impact
also on their VCE enrolments, and it's engaged with the mathematics departments and the humanities
departments, and the teachers in the LOTE groups are working very closely with planning and teaching to
make those opportunities available to their students. Now, the reason I refer to that as an exemplar is
because it started with a CLIL unit that was a few weeks long in the Italian classroom that didn't involve
any other teachers. And I think that is the power of CLIL: that it can start off very small, it can start off with
a very clearly, well-defined unit, and it can start off with one teacher building up a programme that others
see is a quality program, it gets kids to engage with languages like they've never engaged with languages
before, and it gets the whole school interested in what the possibilities are for taking languages outside of
the languages classroom and working with it in ways that the kids are really fully engaged with the
opportunities that exist elsewhere in the curriculum.
You’ll find the video on this webpage of the Language Learning Space:
http://www.lls.edu.au/teacherspace/professionallearning/2186?sectionid=123
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this material free of charge for non-commercial educational purposes until 30 June 2018, unless otherwise indicated.
Professional certificate
In the Melbourne professional certificates that we run around CLIL one of the things that we make all of
our teachers do by the end of the course is plan a unit of work and trial it. And the reason we do this is
because, although it's only short - it might only go for two to three weeks - once teachers have had the
opportunity to see it working in practice, they in fact find it very difficult to go back to what they were
doing. This doesn’t mean that the next year they're going to do a 100% whole-school immersion program
though CLIL that involves everybody else in the school, but it does mean they start working towards how
CLIL can grow and expand in their school in ways that suit their context best. But in almost every case that
we've seen, once teachers have tried CLIL, they've used the four Cs and they've used the triptych to really
help them plan successfully so they don’t feel like they're doing it in the dark or they're fumbling through
on their own. Once they've used these tools and they've had success, they realise that it's just really hard
to go back to doing anything else.
Find more details about the course here:
http://education.unimelb.edu.au/study_with_us/professional_development/course_list/content_and_lang
uage_integrated_learning
© 2015 Education Services Australia Ltd, unless otherwise indicated. Provided acknowledgements are retained, Education Users may use, reproduce and communicate
this material free of charge for non-commercial educational purposes until 30 June 2018, unless otherwise indicated.