Integrated language learning: CLIL two birds with one stone

Some would say it was a risk. The school was in one of the most deprived areas of England, 68 per cent of the pupils were disadvantaged, 85 per cent had English as an additional language (EAL) and it had a specialist deaf unit. So, Bordesley Green Girls’ School and Sixth Form was not the typical environment to introduce Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL). This involves simultaneously learning a content-based subject through the medium of a foreign language and a foreign language by studying a content-based subject.

What is more, we intended to use French - the lowest-performing language in the school - as our core language.

But I never saw it as risky. For 18 years, I had implemented CLIL in schools in different contexts. And for 18 years, I had watched outcomes improve.

What exactly is CLIL?

Professor Do Coyle, chair in languages education and classroom learning, and director of research and knowledge exchange at the University of Edinburgh, provides a useful framework to answer that question. It’s built around the “four Cs”. Some key points from each one are outlined below:

Content

CLIL provides learning contexts that are relevant to the needs and interests of learners. It supports the integration of language into the broader curriculum. It can be explicitly linked to literacy, forming conceptual and linguistic bridges across the curriculum. This should involve first and second language learning and EAL.

Cognition

The method promotes learner progression in language skills and knowledge construction.

Communication

The integrated approach involves direct opportunities to learn through language and to make meanings that matter.

Culture

CLIL is particularly relevant in classrooms where learners have diverse language and cultural experiences. It is an appropriate vehicle for exploring the links between language and cultural identity, and examining behaviours, attitudes and values.

CLIL is essentially an umbrella term that can include immersion programmes, where students can be taught a large proportion of the curriculum - or even all of it - using another language. However, CLIL also includes programmes with less curriculum time devoted to them. For example, at one of my schools, we taught 16 per cent of the curriculum in another language.

Canada has been at the forefront of immersion programmes and other countries, such as Wales and Estonia, have developed their structures using advice from practitioners in the Canadian system.

In Wales, too, there are bilingual schools where approximately 50 per cent of the timetable is delivered in Welsh, and English-medium schools where Welsh is taught as a second language.

But in the rest of the UK, the approach is not common. As Dr Emmanuelle Labeau, co-director of the Centre for Language Research at Aston University in Birmingham, states: “Across the country, there are pockets of activity in CLIL, but these remain fragmented and lack sustainability.”

Does it work?

International research evidence for the positive impact of bilingual education is vast and sometimes contradictory (see Cenoz et al 2014 and Dalton-Puffer et al 2014). But while CLIL is linked to bilingual education, there are significant differences and variables, especially where English is not the vehicular language.

Evidence does suggest that learning subjects through another language impacts positively across the curriculum in specific contexts. National studies linked to international comparators, such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa), also suggest CLIL or bilingual approaches may have contributed to improved scores - for example, in Estonia, Finland and Canada.

However, a recent meta-analysis of CLIL by Tabari et al (2018) identified just 102 relevant articles about the impact of CLIL and only six of these contained enough data to be statistically significant. Of these, five studies showed that the CLIL group outperformed the control group.

Research from Canada certainly confirms that attainment rises in other subjects when subjects are studied through another language. In standardised testing in 2017, 94 per cent of Grade 9 immersion students in New Brunswick did well on their English-language assessments, compared with 74 per cent in the core programme.

In terms of the use of CLIL in the UK, however, there is a paucity of published statistical evidence. Some research links CLIL to improved motivation in language learning, but little research tracks how CLIL might impact on school improvement and cross-curricular learner progression.

An exception was a project that began in 2001. CLIPCAN was a pilot programme for the CLIL approach that included Archbishop Michael Ramsey Technology College, Dartford Grammar School, Greenbank High School, Elliott School, Park View Community School, Tile Hill Wood School, Tomlinscote School and Wolfreton School. They were all specialist language colleges.

Projects of varying magnitude were developed, ranging from modules to whole-school entitlement in Spanish, German and French. I was at Tile Hill Wood School in this period and helped to set up the pilot.

Where students used a language to learn at the school, linguistic competence usually improved. Less able students made relatively more progress than other sub-groups. This was because concepts were deconstructed and language was taught alongside visual clues. When teaching in English, teachers can become lazy about the words that they use, assuming that everyone in the class can understand what they are saying. If you take away that assumption, then the teaching and learning improves.

Integration in action

Dr Philip Hood, of the University of Nottingham, also conducted a longitudinal survey of students at Tile Hill Wood, discovering that the pilot group that studied CLIL geography in Years 7 and 8 for a lesson a week could remember, lesson by lesson, the content of their geography in French lessons three years later.

Great, you might think, but how is this supposed to be implemented? Recruitment and retention are deteriorating and budgets are weak. Teachers are already stressed. Won’t this make all of that worse? To answer, let me first explain how it works in practice.

I am a geographer with A-level French, and I worked with the head of modern foreign languages (MFL) at Tile Hill Wood to develop the pilot project back in 2001. I was very nervous about speaking French in the classroom and I introduced this gradually. I forced myself to do some lesson planning with someone at the school who would speak only French to me. I also did some team teaching with the head of MFL.

In the early days, I produced resources that were checked by a linguist and I did not deliver much of the content in French. However, 18 years later, I can communicate everything I need to convey in a geography lesson in French.

Once we had the approach up and running in geography at Tile Hill Wood, and teachers could observe lessons, other linguists started to come out of the woodwork: a scientist, a musician, an RE teacher and a mathematician announced that they could speak French. Some of our MFL teachers decided that they wanted to teach PSHE.

Therefore, we paired up these subject specialists with linguists, and joint planning produced the very best lesson plans and resources. It worked fantastically well, upskilling teachers, giving them great CPD and reigniting their passion for teaching.

I implemented CLIL at my next school via a similar process. And as headteacher of Bordesley Green, I implemented it as part of a whole-school curriculum review in 2014, following a short pilot in 2013.

We started with Year 7. All pupils in that year follow a European curriculum, where they have as many lessons in their main foreign language (French) as they do in English. This is achieved by having two lessons of French each week, with a lesson of geography, science and business all in French.

Overcoming challenges

Obviously, there were challenges in all three schools. Throughout my experience of CLIL, the programme has been considered controversial when first introduced to a school.

The biggest challenge is always to convince staff. Fear is understandable, as departments worry about retention in their subjects and falling attainment. It is really important that they are included in student feedback and are involved in assessing the outcomes. And it is essential to develop really strong action research to justify the existence of the project and to evaluate it very carefully.

The results tend to win teachers over, and they begin to notice that they have become better teachers and more proficient linguists.

Students tend to be more open to the opportunities. At Tile Hill Wood, for the pilot, we picked mixed-ability groups and allowed students to opt out if they wished: only one did so.

Students are very nervous to start with, so praise is important, as is supporting metacognition. Once they understand how to engage in the process and learn from others, their confidence grows. With language acquisition, there are periods of waiting before you hear spontaneity. You have to be patient and manage the frustration of others.

Including parents is so important, too. We held an open evening and produced a video of the students working in a CLIL lesson. We also modelled some of the activities with the parents and showed how transferable skills could result in higher achievement.

But overall, the thing that convinces students, parents and teachers alike is the results. Across the three schools I have worked in where CLIL was implemented, results have consistently improved.

After five years of research at Tile Hill Wood, we had enough data, qualitative and quantitative, to prove that CLIL not only raised achievement in languages but also gave students a 50 per cent greater chance of gaining five A*-C grades in all their subjects at GCSE. This matches the findings of other schools, and my own at Bordesley Green.

Here, 92 per cent of our students now study a language, with 89 per cent entered for the English Baccalaureate (EBacc). Approximately half of students study French to GCSE level and the others can choose to follow their second language, which they begin in Year 8 (Urdu, Bengali or Arabic).

What’s next?

CLIL could be an important vehicle for supporting curriculum breadth now that Ofsted has signalled that it will focus on this more from next year. It also provides a vehicle for a number of tricky issues, suggesting an answer to questions such as:

• How can my school motivate students to learn languages?
• How can we make languages inclusive?
• How can my school create a smooth transition from primary to secondary in language learning?
• How can students with hearing impairment and EAL learn more effectively?
• How can my school increase the number of students achieving the EBacc to meet government targets?

CPD and support is crucial, though. So, in Birmingham, we have been developing an Association for Language Learning network of schools that are interested in CLIL. We have practitioners and expertise at primary and secondary level. And we have a number of schools that are trying out modules or entire courses.

We have also established Learning Through Languages UK, which was launched in April 2018 and is coordinated by Aston University and Bordesley Green, with support from Birmingham City Council. This hub in Birmingham connects with other notable academic centres around the country where there is considerable CLIL expertise: the University of Edinburgh, the University of Birmingham, Sheffield Hallam University, Manchester Metropolitan University and the University of Westminster, all of which have different strengths and networks linked to them.

At a time when there are funding and workload issues across the sector, it will be difficult to convince senior leaders that they need to introduce something new into their schools. But there is so much to gain from reinvigorating languages, as I hope I have outlined.

Perhaps, if we get this right, we can make a difference. Perhaps this is what we need to recover MFL in the UK. And maybe we will one day reach the same stage that they have in New Brunswick, Canada, where parents camp out all night to secure places at schools offering immersion French teaching.

Judith Woodfield is headteacher of Bordesley Green Girls’ School and Sixth Form in Birmingham

This article originally appeared in the 12 April 2019 issue under the headline “Now you’re talking my languages”