Language as the articulator of a CLIL ecosystem: the Spanish case

Abstract

Spanish Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) provision perfectly reflects what is happening in the kaleidoscopic European language learning landscape. Even though English is the most widely used language in this type of programme, in the course of more than two decades of implementation, CLIL has adapted to the diverse and ecological language policy of the European Union through disparate models in the different regions. Despite the differences among the various contexts, CLIL implementation has morphed into the design of language policies at school level (San Isidro & Lasagabaster, 2019), and these language policies are inextricably connected to teacher qualification, training and collaboration, along with curriculum integration. CLIL schools have thus become cross-curricular language ecosystems involving all the languages of instruction.

In this article we offer a theoretical discussion of the state of the art on CLIL as far as planning and implementation are concerned. We first provide a general overview of the Spanish challenges towards multilingualism. In the second part, we address and discuss in detail the key points in the articulation of a CLIL ecosystem: the role of language itself as an articulator, and the teachers’ profiles and their roles in designing a ‘language aware’ project based on curriculum integration (Otto, 2017b).