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

An example from CLIL-Science
Fig. 2: Cognitive-Demand Equilibrium of ideal CLIL-materials (CCD, Content-Cognitive-Demand; LCD,
Language-Cognitive-Demand).
Subsequently, Ex 2b asks learners to ‘allocate sentences into the correct space’. In
so doing, learners must now consciously re-evaluate content information which,
to this moment, had only received cursory attention in Ex 2a: the covert understanding
that heat provides energy and thus increases molecular motion is now
brought to the conscious-fore. By writing out real-life observations in ‘the proper
language’, content understanding also becomes concrete. In addition, learners
become familiar and comfortable with scientific discourse, moving learners from
what Cummins (1981) recognized as BICS (Basic Interpersonal Communication
Skills) into CALP (Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency). As CALP is
essential for academic success in a FL, CALP becomes a main objective in CLIL
instruction (CLIL-Operand-2).
5. Conclusions: how FL-language instruction can optimize
content-driven CLIL
At least five areas of FL-expertise will contribute to ensuring that CLIL potentiates
and not hinders content-learning. The first is the fact that FL-practitioners
are naturally language-aware, i.e. CLIL-Operand-1, ‘is the language of instruction
comprehensible?’ The aforementioned dismal results obtained when ex-
Anglophone colonies in Africa used English to teach science (Webb 2010) were
dramatically reversed when educators became more language-aware, realizing
that the language of science, even in our own mother tongue, can be a
rather ‘foreign language’. Content-driven CLIL needs FL-experts, who, being
naturally language-aware, can help content-experts determine which language
to use, when and how, so as to equilibrate the content and language cognitive
loads. Thus the second area of FL-expertise needed: FL-practitioners recognize
what constitutes familiar language. Excerpt 2 exemplifies an ineffective contentdriven
CLIL activity developed by a CLIL-science teacher-trainee: although
this teacher masters B2-level English, the language he used to develop CLIL
activities would be incomprehensible to his learners whose English competence
is at level-A2. FL-expertise can easily discern whether the language of
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