In the Netherlands approximately 130 out of 700 secondary schools offer a bilingual stream. However, research about CLIL (content and
language integrated learning) is limited. With her dissertation Evelyn
van Kampen (Ph.D. student at ICLON) wants to contribute to the
understanding of the nature and range of pedagogies employed by CLIL
teachers. Defence on 5 September.
bilingual teacher qualificationCLIL is an educational approach in which an extra language is used to learn and to teach subject matter as well as language. The main aim of
this dissertation is to contribute to a better understanding of the
nature and range of pedagogies employed by CLIL teachers and build the
knowledge base about CLIL pedagogy and practice. It seeks to contribute
to bridging the existing gap between greatly expanded CLIL practice and
more limited CLIL research.
Not one answer
With regard to the question posed in the title of this dissertation, "What's CLIL about bilingual education?," the studies of this
dissertation have clearly shown there is no single answer to this
question and nor should the search for a single answer be the aim of the
research. Rather, the most useful approach of this question would be to
work from the subject discipline. This allows the explicit
identification of what constitutes effective integrated content-language
teaching for particular subject domains.
Despite the longstanding level of institutionalization of bilingual education, there is no guarantee that policy or theoretical insights
will find their way to the practices of the grassroots practitioners. It
seems there is a key role for teacher education, both pre- and
in-service, to address this issue by making theoretical insights more
practical and accessible for practitioners.
