My school teaches a modular CLIL programme in Social Sciences for 20 hours a year for each subject forming part of this area. It's just a soft CLIL. Instead, in Cambridge courses a large part of the curriculum is taught in English language.
I use CLIL methodology mainly in a last year of  the International relations and Marketing course, and,  for a shorter time, at the TouristIc one where many students are not Italian mother tongue.
The students' English average level is B1. Some of them are B2.

 

determine better learning conditions.
Unfortunately, my school has difficulty  in cooperating  and exchanging among teachers involved in  CLIL. 

On the contrary, the coordination among the teachers involved would allow to overcome many uncertainties by adopting specific methodologies: what needs to be limited to some minutes at a time is what is very typical of non-linguistic subjects which is the lecturing procedure, and therefore what shall be preferred is cooperative-learning.

 New strategies and techniques need to be introduced to develop an autonomous production in the foreign language, such as role-play or cloze and matching exercises; and in class what needs to be supplied to students are materials as authentic as possible.

Some teachers, instead, are limited to a translation of an English text.

 In most of the activities, pupils  interact each other and work together as a team with a specific goal. The foreign language represents a  vehicular language used to teach another subject with its own didactic objectives, so  the focus of interest shifts from form to content. Irrefutably, this is very  important to acquire professional content and know-how.

Instructions and comments on the class activities are in English language, so that pupils," while doing, are learning, they are learning by doing."

  By using the foreign language as an operational tool, students simultaneously better acquire that language.

The lexical approach described by M.Violini allows to achieve the above objectives by recognizing and using collocations,  so pupils can  learn words associativily, because the acquisition of vocabulary is a branching process even sharing word meanings with others.

Unfortunately, teachers do not reflect enough on this way of learning and continue to carry out frontal classes that do not encourage active participation by students.

 

I think that educational practices always need to adapt to the cultural demand of learners, teachers and communities.

Recently,  Technology Enhanced Language Learning ( TELL) is spreading and replacing CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning)  because technology is no longer considered as a purely medium to language learning, but as a part of the environment in which language is used, even to connect people.

In the modern age,  globalisation and integration have become key concepts. 

Certainly it is not easy to achieve, but school must meet the challenge of making learning more effective.