4 — 
Overcoming difficulties

Inclusive CLIL and immigrant students, an interview with Thomas Somers

Should CLIL be inclusive?

Well, first off, CLIL – which stands for Content and Language Integrated Learning – is a form of bilingual education. And although it was originally developed for children who speak the dominant, majority language, a number of researchers have recently suggested that CLIL may actually provide a more suitable (language) learning alternative for immigrant minority language students. Better than monolingual education. And better than bilingual educational programmes that were developed for regional language minorities such as Welsh or Catalan [in which children receive instruction through both the dominant language and their mother tongue].
Still, there are some who think that CLIL should not concern itself with immigrant students: instead they make a strict distinction between foreign language instruction for majority-language students, and home language instruction for IM students. I believe that such a view is inherently elitist: in withholding CLIL from immigrant minority language students, we limit their opportunities, creating further inequality between majority-language speakers and immigrant minority-language speakers, and risk a number of negative consequences (e.g., loss of self-esteem, lost opportunity to learn an additional language). So, with a resounding yes!, CLIL should be inclusive.

Can you give some more reasons why CLIL is better for immigrant students?

Firstly, all other forms of minority bilingual education fall short in one way or another. Traditional forms of bilingual education designed for the regional minorities I mentioned earlier are unsuitable for immigrant minority language students. With a regional minority you have all speakers of a minority language clustered in the same region, often with a local government and dedicated educational infrastructure (teachers, materials). Now, you don’t have that with immigrant minority language speakers. These are scattered throughout a country in small numbers, but there’s a large number of different minority languages (sometimes up to a hundred in one city alone – imagine setting up separate schools for each of these!). Finding qualified bilingual teachers and materials is difficult. Sometimes these languages don’t even exist in written form, and when they do it’s possible children don’t speak the standardized language but a dialect at home… And even if we were able to overcome with all these difficulties, do we really want to group immigrant minority language students into separate home language programmes? That’s only going to further segregate them from mainstream teaching, and eventually society at large, and it’s going to provide them not with more, but with less chances of success.

Secondly, even though the research evidence is on the whole rather scarce (especially for Europe), the available evidence suggests that CLIL is becoming rather popular among immigrant families as it allows them to acquire linguistic, social, economic and symbolic capital. To these students and their families, CLIL serves as a strategy for upward social mobility, allowing them to better access national and international language communities, both for reasons of integration and to gain an advantage on the globalized job market. Academically, in terms of subject knowledge and language development, these students actually perform at a level comparable (and in some cases superior) to that of their majority-language peers, developing additive bi-/multilingualism in a second (the surrounding majority language) and third (foreign, CLIL) language in the process.

Thirdly, CLIL allows these students to acquire advanced levels of functional proficiency in an additional language (which you wouldn’t have in either monolingual education, or regional bilingual education).

Fourthly, in CLIL they can learn in a more scaffolded, more interactive, and more motivating way, which will also facilitate their access to the content which we want them to acquire in the first place.

And fifthly, CLIL allows immigrant minority language students develop a positive self-image and motivation. Because think about it, in a class taught in a foreign language, no one has an advantage, all kids are in the same boat together because the language of instruction is no one’s native language.

How would inclusive CLIL work? How do we implement it?

Even though the language of instruction in CLIL is not necessarily the L1 of all the students, CLIL methodology is fundamentally inclusive in that it allows for the co-existence and use of all students’ languages in the classroom. CLIL supports, recognizes and valorizes students’ immigrant minority languages and backgrounds. And we see this is a strong predictor of success. Moreover, by studying in an environment that supports their minority languages and cultures, IM students can gain extra languages and achieve academic success without the psychological drawbacks associated with other programmes (such as monolingual education) in which students native languages are not used as languages of instruction.

That is because CLIL constitutes an empowering environment in which students have more interactional space, allowing them to produce more personally involved talk, giving them more meaning-driven opportunities for language development. This can even lead to what is called “deeper semantic processing” as students reflection more on expressing themselves which also boosts understanding of content concepts. As a result of this empowerment, students in CLIL are more self-assured and have lower anxiety to use the target language, even if they have difficulty to express themselves, as their language is not under the same oppressive scrutiny as in the foreign language classroom and, for IM students, in all other dominant-language classrooms.