PROFILING EUROPEAN CLIL CLASSROOMS

The Need for Research on CLIL in Europe
Kees de Bot
Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen
Profiling European CLIL Classrooms is an important milestone in the development of
CLIL in the European context. The political climate for such an approach on a larger
scale also seems to be favourable. Nevertheless, there is still a lot we need to learn in
order to fully realise the potential of CLIL.
In the recent past a number of research projects have been carried out to establish the
effectiveness of the CLIL approach. The results of such research, particularly in the
Netherlands and Germany, suggest that some forms of CLIL enhance the effectiveness
of language learning and teaching. Any research in this field requires thorough and
often inter-disciplinary analysis. In addition, research issues are more clearly understood
by a wider audience if an overall picture of an innovation as complex as CLIL is
available.
The analysis of CLIL characteristics presented in Profiling European CLIL Classrooms is
a step forward towards development of a more comprehensive understanding of CLIL
in its various forms. This book focuses on nine factors linked to implementation: agerange,
sociolinguistic environment, exposure, target language, teachers, discourse
type, trans-languaging, subject appropriacy, and content-language ratio. These are
all variables that contribute to the character of any specific form of CLIL.
The achievements of this type of publication can facilitate our need to move forward in
our understanding of the impact of CLIL. In the field of applied linguistics, many of
these issues are given attention, but mostly as one or two factors in isolation from
others, and not usually aimed at CLIL. Analysing the consequences of all these factors
and their interactions is a complex process. A series of interrelated research projects
which examine some of these factors in situ could be one step in collecting quantifiable
and relevant data which gives substance to any discussion about the merits or problems
arising from an educational approach such as CLIL.
It is unlikely that any single European organisation would be able to carry out the scale
of research we now need without institutional collaboration and teamwork. This
cooperation would need to be trans-national to represent at least some of the very
different European situations in which CLIL is implemented. It is understanding CLIL,
its challenges and outcomes, at the local level that enables us to substantiate and
otherwise provide evidence for its value in general.
This publication, and the accompanying CLIL Compendium Internet site, is the result
of a low budget international collaborative project. The outcomes envisaged by the
team members were, from the outset, modest. They set out to build an inclusive
description of CLIL and produce this in a reader-friendly format, and this they have
achieved. As a result, Profiling European CLIL Classrooms will have some impact on
the research agenda for the years to come.
Kees de Bot
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