Multilinguismo, CLIL e innovazione didattica - Libera Università di ...

Y.L. Teresa Ting
The issue of science-literacy is therefore not that the planet Earth needs more
scientists but that 21 st century citizens cannot afford to be scientifically illiterate
(Schleicher 2010). This concerns all educators. To ensure pro-active as
well as defensive 21 st century citizenship (Pearson et al. 2010), 21 st century
education must empower learners to recognize, scrutinize and even generate
science discourse (Osborne 2010). We have, however, a dilemma: whilst the
way scientific knowledge is languaged is not conducive to learning science,
students must nonetheless become familiar with this way of languaging
knowledge. Thus CLIL. Interpreted ‘mathematically’, CLIL provides scienceeducators
concrete guidelines for implementing highly language-aware and
learner-centred science-classrooms.
3. A modus operandi for content-driven CLIL
Since it debuted as an acronym in the mid-1990s, CLIL has evolved from
simply a way to increase FL-exposure, ergo FL-learning, into a pragmatic
approach for renovating education. This is the logic: if we interpret the CLIL
acronym mathematically (Ting, 2011), we obtain a [50:50]/[Content:Language]
ratio which solicits the core question: ‘whose language does the [50/Language]
refer to?’ Since the answer is obviously the language of the learner, not the
teacher, this Core-CLIL-Construct asks if, how and how well the learner is
acquiring, using and mastering the foreign language. This shifts our attention
away from the act of teaching and onto the process of learning.
This founds three concrete ways of proceeding, three CLIL-Operands. First of
all, as learners must acquire content-knowledge through a FL, for which they
have limited linguistic resources, the CLIL-teacher naturally asks ‘is the inputlanguage
comprehensible?: Do learners even understand the language that I,
the teacher, or the book is using?’ This is CLIL-Operand-1. Secondly, if the
purpose of using a FL is so learners can master it, we automatically cultivate
not only learners’ receptive skills of reading and listening but also their
productive skills of speaking and writing: CLIL-Operand-2 thus asks ‘Can
learners use language effectively to obtain information, negotiate meaning, discuss
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