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    Investigating the field

CLIL in languages other than English –
Successful transitions across educational stages

Overview
Concepts and
background
Curriculum
Teacher
education
Collaboration
Teaching
materials
Portfolio and formative assessment

Investigating the field: The CLIL LOTE study

In 2021 the CLIL LOTE project team carried out a survey to collect information about the challenges and potentials concerning Content and Language Integrated Learning in languages other than English across ECML member states.

The main results of the CLIL LOTE study can be summarized as follows:

  • CLIL is only found to a very limited extent in languages other than English.
  • Transitions between levels of education are given very little attention.
  • CLIL is almost never linked to plurilingual education/pluralistic approaches to languages.

The respondents highlighted three key factors that make it difficult to implement CLIL in languages other than English:

  1. CLIL is not very often part of teacher education and therefore there are not enough teachers trained to use this approach.
  2. Teaching traditions make it difficult to use this approach because they do not offer links between languages and other subjects.
  3. There is a lack of teaching materials and basic information on how to implement this approach.

In the comments section, the respondents elaborated on their answers and expressed the view that there is a clear lack of basic knowledge among teachers in this field. In addition, several respondents pointed out that it is difficult to build a bridge between something that hardly exists: "There are so few examples of CLIL LOTE that meaningful transitions are difficult to establish."

In spite of these problems the respondents pointed to a wide range of focus areas that could help to create better transitions between levels of education when working with CLIL LOTE. These focus areas form the basis of the Recommendations to support CLIL in languages other than English across educational stages and have led to the constitution of the project’s working groups. This network elaborated the vast majority of practice materials presented on this website.

Download the survey results (pdf)

Methodology

The survey was completed by respondents from 29 countries who were nominated by the national authorities of the ECML member states due to their expertise in the field of CLIL and/or LOTE. The answers were analyzed based on descriptive statistics Holcomb, Z. C. (1997).
Fundamentals of Descriptive Statistics. Routledge. and qualitative content analysis Mayring, P. (2015).
Qualitative Inhaltsanalyse. Grundlagen und Techniken. Beltz.

Mayring, P. (2014).
Qualitative content analysis: theoretical foundation, basic procedures and software solution. Klagenfurt. .

The survey was developed by the project team in collaboration with the associate partners. The questions were based on Eurydice publications published in 2006 and 2017 Eurydice 
(Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency) (2006), "Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) at school in Europe", available here.

Eurydice 
(Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency) (2017), "Key data on teaching languages at school in Europe", available here. and were complemented by questions focusing on transitions and plurilingual education in CLIL.

The survey had five sections and included close- and open-ended questions.

SECTION 1: CLIL in languages other than English (CLIL LOTE)

SECTION 2: Transitions in the curriculum

SECTION 3: Transitions in CLIL LOTE

SECTION 4: CLIL LOTE and pluralistic approaches

SECTION 5: CLIL LOTE networks

Download the questionnaire (pdf)