Identifying effective L2 pedagogy in content and language integrated learning (CLIL)

In Europe, Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is becoming a popular and widespread practice of immersion education. In the Netherlands, for example, over 90 schools for secondary education offer a CLIL strand. Most CLIL teachers, however, are non-native speakers of the target language, and do not have a professional background in language pedagogy. How, then, can these teachers effectively contribute to the target language development and proficiency of their students? In this paper, we will discuss the findings of a study carried out in three schools for secondary education offering CLIL. The purpose of the study was to observe and analyze effective CLIL teaching performance facilitating language development and proficiency. The analysis was carried out by means of an observation tool for effective CLIL teaching performance, based on the following principles from second language pedagogy: (1) exposure to input; (2) content-oriented processing; (3) form-oriented processing; (4) (pushed) output; and (5) strategic language use. We will discuss how the observed CLIL pedagogy is related to content-based teaching and task-based language teaching, and provide recommendations for effective language pedagogy in CLIL. We will argue that not only CLIL-teachers can benefit from effective language-pedagogical approaches, but that language teachers can benefit from effective CLIL approaches and experiences as well.