PROFILING EUROPEAN CLIL CLASSROOMS

The Past Decade and the Next Millennium
Hugo Baetens Beardsmore
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
The final decade of the 20 th century has witnessed a liberating explosion of initiatives
in multilingual education. Confidence in the value of plurilingual skills has encouraged
Europeans to break away from the dependence on North American immersion models
for support and justification, enabling parents, schools and authorities to build up
exciting programmes that take account of local, regional, national and international
realities. The result has been that demand is outstripping supply for efficient, contentbased
multilingual education in many countries. Ever more parents are willing to
plunge their children into education partly conducted in more than one language, but
teacher availability, materials provision, curricular adjustment and exit criteria are
struggling to keep up with rapid evolution.
Behind this encouraging development lie globalisation, computerisation, rationalisation
and migration. It is proving ever more difficult to keep up in work, travel, recreation or
information within the confines of a single language, the more so in Europe where
mobility crosses language borders. Hence an increasing acceptance of the need to
break through the restrictions of formal language lessons, which in spite of
methodological progress, rarely produce high levels of plurilingual proficiency for the
majority. Language lessons are vital for accuracy but do not provide sufficient contact
time with a target language and need supplementing with opportunities to use language
in meaningful activities.
The variety of bilingual education programmes now available as models is striking,
while constant monitoring by solid research is providing sophisticated insights into
aspects of learning through a second and third language not known before. Authorities
that never even considered implementing bilingual programmes have at times become
the most supportive of innovation. The Netherlands (as in England and Austria) started
bilingual content-matter education in the nineties, concentrating on secondary schools.
Designers have had to reflect on the implications for final examination strategies. The
Dutch insist on all final secondary exams for content matter being taken in Dutch, to
avoid potential language shift, thereby affecting the curricular distribution of languages.
This illustrates one effect of implementing bilingual programmes with a different strategy
from that used in Germany, where final exams may be optionally taken in the two
languages involved. Walloon Belgium has broken through entrenched resistance to
any form of bilingual education since 1998 by allowing individual schools to set up
controlled forms of content-matter teaching through two languages from primary school
onwards if all the parties involved, parents, teachers, authorities, can guarantee the
solidity of the project. France has encouraged earlier intensified contact with a second
language as a subject while promoting initiatives in varied forms of bilingual education
depending on the region. This is a major break away from the highly centralised, tightly
controlled monolingual education of the past. In border areas, like the Alsace, primary
schools can even offer a 50-50% spread across two languages from the very beginning.
In Spain ever more schools are beginning early second language learning from the age of
3 onwards, leading on to some form of bilingual content-matter teaching in primary
school.
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